The developers of the KVM hypervisor have launched a new NoSQL database called ScyllaDB that boasts some impressive performance numbers. ScyllaDB is fully compatible with the open source Apache Cassandra database, but it achieves “10x the throughput and jaw-dropping latency” because it is written in C++ code that can take advantage of multi-core processing hardware.
To write the new database, the team also created a C++ framework called Seastar, which they say provides “optimal performance on modern hardware.” The ScyllaDB website explains, “Because sharing of information across cores requires costly locking, Seastar uses a shared-nothing model that shards all requests onto individual cores. Seastar runs one application thread per core, and depends on explicit message passing, not shared memory between threads. This design avoids slow, unscalable lock primitives and cache bounces.”
ScyllaDB says that it can complete up to 1 million transactions per second per server.
