… related to performance – if you use Transactions, then there are some unnecessary fsync/fdatasync calls, slowing down performance by 30%.
I will release a fixed version (1.1.11) tonight.
And i’ll extend my test suite to have a poor man’s performance tracking.
From the README:
This release fixes a bug in the cache, which caused the cache to grow and exceed the cache limits. A few other minor bugs were fixed, and the recovery process was improved: changes in the header page (i.e. when adding new Databases or when changing the address of a root page) were not correctly logged. The flag HAM_WRITE_THROUGH has a new meaning: instead of immediately flushing all pages it will now flush all file handles after a Transaction was committed or aborted. This has a performance impact, but improves the Durability of the Transactions. Sources, CHANGELOG and precompiled win32 libraries are available for download here!
This release was long overdue. There were some bugs reported that were hard to reproduce and to track down, family also required more time than usual, and in the same time i was also working on the first release of 2.0.0 (rc1), which will implement the new transaction handling. I hope i can release it in the next few weeks – i have to port a couple of patches from 1.1.10 to the new branch and also make sure that everything compiles and works on Windows. The first release will be unstable – there were so many code changes and the test coverage for some parts of the new code is still not satisfying. In addition i have some ideas how to boost performance, but so far i had no time to implement them.
Stay tuned 
This release fixes a minor bug in ham_cursor_move; if the second parameter (“record”) is NULL and compression is enabled, hamsterdb crashes. Also, the unittest-dependency to cppunit was removed.
Sources, CHANGELOG and precompiled win32 libraries are available for download.
Curt Monash is a database analyst. He usually blogs about enterprise databases and not the embedded kind. Nevertheless his posts are really interesting, therefore i added him to my blogroll.
This post is about harddisks and why cheap (SATA) harddisks are much slower than expensive ones (Fibre channel/SAS).