up vote 0 down vote favorite
Share on Facebook

I was looking for a good ASP.NET hosting, I found a good one and sent them email to ask them about the plan I will choose. While they were discussing some issues with me I asked if it is better to choose SQL Server or MySQL and they said that's my choice but they recommened MySQL and they said it takes less memory, here is a quote from their email:

" mySQL uses allot less memory, for example we have one SQL Server database with 100 databases and it uses 5GB of memory, we have also a mySQL database with also 100 databases which uses 300MB of memory.The memory footprint of mySQL is very much smaller than SQL Server."

What do you think?

link|flag
57% accept rate
This is really a SO question as it is technical in nature, imo anyway. – Chris Nov 22 at 19:40
1  
@Chris or maybe a serverfault question? Or superuser? – Yar Nov 22 at 22:53

closed as off topic by Gratzy, Walter, Pierre 303, Jesse C. Slicer, Josh K Nov 22 at 23:09

Questions on Programmers are expected to be about subjective issues in software development, within the scope defined in the faq.

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

SQL Server can use a lot of memory but this is not a bad thing and is by design. It will do as much caching in memory and allocate as much space to itself as possible which will improve performance. If you have a 500mb database but your database server is only allocating 10mb then you must be a lot of disk reads/writes in a high transaction environment.

Having said that, if your server has very little memory, ie 512mb on a VPS, SQL Server can slow it down, although SQL Server Express works pretty well.

link|flag
Oops! that's why small asp.net websites are slow sometimes! – Goma Nov 22 at 22:31
It should only be an issue of web and database servers are the same box and they are not configured correctly. – Craig Nov 22 at 22:34
up vote 3 down vote

I think it would be extremely hard to get a true apples/apples comparison between the two. There are probably hundreds of variables that need to be taken into account for memory usage by either platform.

In any event, memory usage would not be in the top 5 reasons I'd pick one platform over the other.

link|flag
When a database uses more memory, will this affect the performacne of a website? – Goma Nov 22 at 19:49
Sometimes it will, sometimes it wont. Sometimes it will positively impact performance, sometimes it will negatively impact performance. There are just too many variables to answer this without specifics. – JohnFx Nov 22 at 21:31
+1 for "In any event, memory usage would not be in the top 5 reasons I'd pick one platform over the other." – radekg Nov 22 at 22:22

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.