Entering the benchmark game will shift the debate to the complexity plane, where the HBase dependency will be pointed as a weakness.
We all know benchmarks should be taken with a pinch of salt. That said, a benchmarks saying that Influx is that much better than OpenTSDB from a performance point of view seemed a little suspicious to me.
Not saying there is any ill intent there, OpenTSDB+HBase is relatively complex and someone who hasn't spent enough time playing with it can easily miss important points. I may add a comment on that page to point out how the test could be made a bit more relevant.Reading the details, I saw a few things that could explain this:- no mention of pre-splitting the HBase tables. On newly created tables, that would give us a single region: am I right to think that HBase would be unlikely to use all the resources available on the server in that scenario, which would result in poor performance, and could explain the difference in performance they report?
- they disabled TSDB compaction (due to performance issues), and they don't mention using compression on the HBase tables: would that explain a good chunk if not all of the disk usage difference?
- also no mention of the TSDB metadata settings from what I can remember, even though they have a significant impact on performance. As there is a trade off between performance and features, would make sense to state which settings they chose here.
- the test is on a single node, but I suspect most people run OpenTSDB on multi-nodes, and often quite a few of them. Testing that scenario too would be sensible.