TDE test report - ApsaraDB RDS - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

This topic describes the performance impact of Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) on RDS for MySQL instances with different specifications. It covers the effects on CPU and memory to help you decide whether to enable TDE.

Test conclusions

Enabling TDE reduces performance and increases CPU utilization on RDS for MySQL instances.

With low concurrency, the performance loss is significant, up to 20%. With high concurrency, the performance loss drops to below 5% because of factors such as I/O merging.
For an instance with 4 cores and 16 GB of memory, enabling TDE and accessing encrypted tables increases CPU utilization by 0.06% to 4.22%. For an instance with 8 cores and 32 GB of memory, the CPU utilization increases by 0.12% to 2.86%.
Overall, the performance loss is more significant in write-intensive scenarios, such as oltp_write_only and oltp_update_index.

Test environment

Configuration item	Test scenario 1	Test scenario 2
Region and zone	cn-hangzhou
Network type	Virtual Private Cloud
Hardware architecture	x86-64
Storage type	Premium Local SSDs
CPU	4 cores	8 cores
Memory	16 GB	32 GB
Buffer Pool size	12 GB	24 GB
Maximum IOPS	7000	12000
Instance version	mysql80_8.0.28_20230610
Test dataset size	41 GB

Test tool

Sysbench is an open source, modular, cross-platform, and multi-threaded benchmark tool used to evaluate the performance of a database system under a heavy load. For more information, see the Sysbench documentation.

Test metrics

Transactions Per Second (TPS): The number of transactions that a database commits per second.
Average latency: The average time that the database takes to execute a transaction, measured in milliseconds (ms).

Test table schema

The default table schema for Sysbench is as follows:

CREATE TABLE `sbtest8` (
  `id` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `k` int NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `k_8` (`k`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=100001 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb3

Test procedure

This test measures the performance of accessing encrypted tables on a TDE-enabled MySQL instance in different scenarios.

Create an RDS for MySQL instance. For more information, see Create an RDS for MySQL instance.
Create a database and an account. For more information, see Create a database and an account.
On an ECS instance that runs Linux, run the following commands to install the MySQL client.
- For CentOS, run sudo yum install mysql.
- For Ubuntu, run sudo apt-get update and then run sudo apt install mysql-server.
Open the MySQL command line interface and run the following command to connect to the RDS for MySQL database.
```
mysql -h<database_endpoint> -u<username> -P<port_number> -p<password>
```
Note
To obtain the database endpoint and port number, see View and manage instance endpoints and ports.
Exit the database and use the Sysbench tool to load the test data.
Note
- In this test, Sysbench is used to load 128 tables, each containing 100,000 records. The following script example uses the oltp_read_write model.
- In the example code, the number of threads is 16. Replace this value with the actual number of threads, such as 1, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or 256.
```
sysbench --db-driver=mysql --mysql-host=[database server host] --mysql-port=[database server port] --mysql-user=[database user name] --mysql-password=[database user password] --mysql-db=testdb --table_size=1000000 --tables=128 --threads=16 --time=60 oltp_read_write prepare
```

Run the custom test script.

sysbench --db-driver=mysql --mysql-host=[database server host] --mysql-port=[database server port] --mysql-user=[database user name] --mysql-password=[database user password] --mysql-db=testdb --table_size=1000000 --tables=128 --threads=16 --time=60 oltp_read_write run

Clean up the data.

sysbench --db-driver=mysql --mysql-host=[database server host] --mysql-port=[database server port] --mysql-user=[database user name] --mysql-password=[database user password] --mysql-db=testdb --table_size=1000000 --tables=128 --threads=16 --time=60  oltp_read_write cleanup

Test scenario 1: Comparison for a 4-core 16 GB instance with Premium Local SSDs before and after TDE is enabled

Test data

Instance performance trend graphs for each model

CPU

Performance data summary

Note

rds_ssd_4c16g_tde_off[3]: The 4-core 16 GB RDS for MySQL instance with TDE disabled.

rds_ssd_4c16g_tde_on[2]: The 4-core 16 GB RDS for MySQL instance with TDE enabled.

Test scenario 2: Comparison for an 8-core 32 GB instance with Premium Local SSDs before and after TDE is enabled

Test data

Instance performance trend graphs for each model

Performance data summary

Note

rds_ssd_8c32g_tde_off[11]: The 8-core 32 GB RDS for MySQL instance with TDE disabled.

rds_ssd_8c32g_tde_on[12]: The 8-core 32 GB RDS for MySQL instance with TDE enabled.