Node vs Deno Database Drivers - Latency Comparison

I recently noticed some elevated latency when connecting to a Planetscale MySQL database in a Deno project.

This project exists to verify how latency compares between the various MySQL and Postgres clients available in Node and Deno.

The goal is to understand if the same drivers have different latency characteristics when running on Node vs Deno. For more driver breadth, I've included both MySQL and Postgres drivers.

How do I run this?

Prerequisites

• Install Deno 1.36.1: https://deno.land/manual@v1.36.1/getting_started/installation
• Install Node.js 18.17.1: https://nodejs.org/en/download

Check your Node and Deno versions with:

deno --version
# deno 1.36.1 (release, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
# v8 11.6.189.12
# typescript 5.1.6

node -v
# v18.17.1

Set up

• Clone and cd into this repository
• Set up your databases and make a note of the database connection URLs. I'm using:
  • Planetscale - serverless MySQL
  • Supabase - Postgres (I'm just using the database, not their "Firebase alternative" features). To connect to Supabase using Deno, you'll need to download an "SSL Certificate" from your Supabase database settings. Then save it in your local repo: ./certs/supabase.crt (see here and look into DENO_CERT environment variable for more info)
• Create a .env file: cp .env.example .env
• Enter your database connection URLs into the .env file
• Connect to your databases and (manually) execute the SQL queries in setup.sql - it will create a posts table with 250 rows

Running it

Start the Node.js tests server:

npm run start

Visit http://localhost:8080 and wait a bit for it to run! (browsers may time out while waiting for results - I recommend using a HTTP client like Insomnia, which didn't time out in my testing).

When you're done, shut down the server so port 8080 is free to run with Deno.

Now run the Deno tests server and repeat the same steps:

deno task start

Results

This comparison is not intended to compare Postgres vs MySQL. The goal is to compare the performance of various database drivers in the Node.js and Deno ecosystems.

Testing is done using:

• Fly.io performance-1x server with 1 CPU and 2GB RAM, hosted in lhr (London)
• Planetscale Serverless MySQL free tier, hosted in aws-eu-west-2 (London)
• Supabase Postgres free tier, hosted in gcp-europe-west2 (London)

Each query is run 50 times with each driver, with each runtime. These graphs show the min/p25/p75/max of each driver and runtime tested. The Y-axis shows query time in milliseconds - lower is better:

The results are pretty close, with the exception of Planetscale Serverless when running on Deno.

You can find the data in CSV format in ./results.

Compatibility issues

⚠️ MySQL2 and MariaDB drivers do not currently work on Deno when using TLS, so this repo currently only uses them with Node.js.

See this bug report for more information: denoland/deno#20293