Recent Posts (benchmark)

Trying MySQL MEMORY Tables as a Simple Cache (and Failing Spectacularly)

• By Ercan
• 26/10/2025

Sometimes you want a quick in-app cache without adding Redis or Hazelcast. MySQL MEMORY tables look promising: “RAM-resident, fast, simple”. Curious, I decided to test it myself on a local development environment. Environment MySQL Server: 9.5.0 (Homebrew, default settings except max_heap_table_size) Local machine: MacBook Pro 15-inch, 2019, 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9-9880H, 16 GB RAM MEMORY table max_heap_table_size: increased to 512 MB to accommodate 1 million rows Test scenario: 50 parallel threads Insert 1 million OTP tokens 50,000 read queries Benc..