One thing I have noticed with MySQL alternatives is that they are stated to be faster than MySQL for large database / high volume usage.
That’s great and certainly useful for a lot of sites. My site, however, I am actually seeing worse performance with Percona and MariaDB.
The site has low traffic, includes a forum but the main use is for displaying stats from the database. In one particular report the time taken from generating to completing in the browser window is as follows:
MySQL 5.8sec
Percona 6.2sec
MariaDB 6.5sec
All are using the same my.cnf file, so I wonder if I need to do any further tweaking to see better performance with Percona or MariaDB?