Finally, we get what we've been waiting for; a sizeable victory. Based on these results, MySQL definitely likes the improvements 2.6 brings to the table. 2.6.4 bests 2.4.25 by approximately 19.2%. That's a considerable improvement considering all we're doing here is updating our kernel. To get an extra 20% of database performance without adding hardware or even updating the database software is certainly impressive. Those of you out there running MySQL on aging hardware with kernel 2.4 could jump to kernel 2.6 and possibly extend the life of your hardware for a little while longer.

Let's move on to the write performance of our database server, shall we?

I think it's pretty clear what kernel version we should be running if we're dependent on MySQL performance. By jumping to kernel 2.6 here we see an approximate 14.5% increase in database write performance. Impressive. It looks like I'm going to have some decisions to make regarding whether or not I make the jump to kernel 2.6 on our web server.

Let's move on to file server performance and then we'll wrap this article up with some concluding remarks.