Two of Our Six Graph Databases Died Under the Exact Same Load. Here's Why That's a Good Thing.
Take-home assignment: benchmark CognoDB against a handful of other graph databases, fairly. The fairness rule was blunt — every database gets the same tiny resource cap, 0.5 vCPU, 256MB RAM, no exceptions. Easy to say. Two platforms didn't survive it. Memgraph kept getting killed by the Linux OOM reaper mid-import. First guess was a missing index. Wrong, checked, fixed, still died. Second guess…
Two out of six graph databases failed to perform under identical load conditions, which is considered a positive outcome. The benchmarking was conducted fairly, with each database restricted to a minimal resource allocation of 0.5 vCPU and 256MB RAM. Memgraph and ArangoDB experienced failures during the test, indicating a memory constraint in their in-memory transactional engines.
Memgraph struggled to clear a 256MB memory floor, while ArangoDB failed to detect the container's memory limit correctly, leading to excessive internal caching. Kùzu, an embedded graph database, demonstrated exceptional performance with a minimal memory footprint of 1.94MB. Despite Kùzu lacking traditional indexing, it outperformed ArangoDB's indexed lookup by nearly 40 times (4.7ms versus 196.7ms).
The results showcased the distinct strengths and weaknesses of each database, with no single winner.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
