Author: Mike Hearn 2013-09-17 11:45:18
Published on: 2013-09-17T11:45:18+00:00
In an email exchange from September 2013, Jorge Timón questioned the use of BerkleyDB for the Bitcoin wallet and suggested getting rid of the libdb4.8++-dev dependency that made bitcoind harder to compile on Debian and Ubuntu. Mike Hearn responded by discussing the performance of LevelDB, a database used in Bitcoin Core, and its competitors. HyperLevelDB is a forked version of LevelDB with some changes, including finer-grained locking and changes to how compaction works. Sophia is another competitor to LevelDB that claims to completely outperform it in benchmarks, though Hearn did not explore the specifics or attempt to replicate the results himself. The benchmark that Sophia excels at is random reads, which are crucial for UTXO lookups. However, it should be noted that as of 2021, Bitcoin Core still uses BerkeleyDB for the wallet.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T16:59:30.039249+00:00