Mnesia Query Performance

[Rob Harrop]

Hi,

I've been doing a bit of tuning on our use of mnesia in RabbitMQ and I'm 
a bit puzzled by the fact that read performance in transactions appears 
to be quadratic (or worse).

I ran a test in which I do only reads (no writes, no matching) on both 
set and ordered_set tables. From the results, it is clear that 
transaction execution time does not increase linearly:

[{ordered_set,500,11},
  {ordered_set,1000,34},
  {ordered_set,2000,120},
  {ordered_set,4000,418},
  {ordered_set,8000,1800},
  {ordered_set,16000,9981},
  {set,500,11},
  {set,1000,35},
  {set,2000,115},
  {set,4000,406},
  {set,8000,1808},
  {set,16000,9804}]

Here the second slot in each tuple is the number of reads and the third 
slot is tx execution time in milliseconds.

I have attached the test code.

Am I doing something horribly wrong, or is this expected behaviour? If 
this is expected behaviour are there are known/accepted workarounds?

Kind Regards,

Rob Harrop
RabbitMQ
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