Memory Engine Performance

[Saurabh Gupta]

Hi,
We have developed a B2C portal which is backed by MySQL. We have used caching at multiple levels. Since the request is widely varied, we are still left with approximately 60% requests not being served from cache.

We want to use memory engine for some big tables with approximately 2M records. Mostly these tables are used for read operations i.e. Select queries.

Would using memory engine make any significance difference?

I am looking at performance statistics of the memory engine over other storage engine in MySQL i.e. MyISAM, InnoDB.

Some people have not found the memory engine very effective in terms of performance. They find it only 10%-12% faster.
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,191915,191915
http://blog.teksol.info/2008/12/12/mysqls-memory-engine-barely-faster-than-innodbs.html

Thanks,
Saurabh