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PolarDB:Performance comparison between the High-Compression Engine (X-Engine) and the Cluster Edition (InnoDB engine) for PolarDB for MySQL 8.0.1

Last Updated:Mar 30, 2026

X-Engine Edition uses the X-Engine storage engine developed by Alibaba Cloud. Its primary advantage is high data compression: when storing the same volume of data, X-Engine Edition uses one-fifth to one-third of the storage that the InnoDB engine requires. This makes X-Engine Edition well-suited for large-scale, cost-efficient data archiving. For more information, see Archive Database Cluster Edition.

This page presents online transaction processing (OLTP) performance benchmarks comparing X-Engine Edition against Cluster Edition (InnoDB engine) in PolarDB for MySQL 8.0.1, across three workload types: read-only, write-only, and read/write mixed.

X-Engine Edition and Cluster Edition use different storage engines. To bring out the highest performance of each engine, the tests use different thread counts for nodes with the same specifications. For test methodology details, see OLTP performance test tools and methods.

Read-only performance comparison of different specifications

Read-only performance
In this test, range_selects is set to 0, which disables range queries on all Sysbench-generated data. Therefore, the performance is high.

Write-only performance comparison of different specifications

Write-only performance

Read/write performance comparison of different specifications

Read and write performance