MySQL 8.2 vs MariaDB 11.3: Read-Heavy Workload Benchmark on AWS RDS

Read-heavy workloads dominate modern application use cases, from content management systems and e-commerce product catalogs to real-time analytics dashboards. For teams running managed databases on AWS RDS, choosing between MySQL 8.2 (the latest long-term support release from Oracle) and MariaDB 11.3 (the newest stable release from the MariaDB Foundation) can impact performance, cost, and operational efficiency. This benchmark compares the two databases under identical AWS RDS configurations for read-heavy workloads.

Test Setup

All tests were run in the AWS us-east-1 region using identical RDS instance configurations to isolate database-specific performance differences:

Instance type: db.m6g.large (2 vCPU, 8GB RAM, ARM-based Graviton2 processor)

Storage: 100GB gp3 SSD, 3000 provisioned IOPS, 125MB/s throughput

Database versions: MySQL 8.2.0, MariaDB 11.3.2

Network: Same VPC, subnet, and security group for both instances

Workload…