Performance Testing and Comparison of Client Side Databases Versus Server Side

Databases are a crucial part of today’s Internet based web applications. To date, almost all web applications have used server side databases. With the adaption of HTML5, which is currently in the process of being standardized by W3C, new client side databases are being introduced that will be embedded in the web browser. Client side databases have the advantage of reducing load on the web server, but the disadvantage that database performance will vary depending on the user’s web browser and in particular how the browser’s designers have chosen to implement the IndexedDB API. In this paper we describe appropriate database benchmarks and apply these to three current web browsers, Google Chrome 24, Firefox 17. We also compare these results with the popular server side database MySQL. The benchmarking is based on writing, reading and deleting database data. The comparison of benchmarks shows the suitability of client side versus server side databases. Our findings are that there are significant performance differences between the indexedDB implementations. The main differences are discussed in relation to the benchmark results. Irrespective of browser differences, the results show that client side databases perform well in comparison to server side databases whilst reducing network latency concerns.