MongoDB vs MySQL: speed test part 1, Insert queries

Recently I started exploring NoSQL databases as an alternative for some of our high traffic mysql tables. After going through a number of articles on net, I decided to explore MongoDB. I tried to compare the performance of different database operations (inserts/ different types of selects) in mongoDB and in MySQL. Performance comparison of insert operations are given here.

Test setup:
For testing I used a 3.16 GHz, Intel Xeon CPU with 2 GB of memory and 350 GB of disk.

MySQL:

key_buffer = 128M
sort_buffer_size = 512K
read_buffer_size = 256K
max_allowed_packet = 1M

Table schema:

ID int(11)
NAME varchar(35)
BIRTH_DT date
CONTACT_ADDRESS varchar(150)
CITY int(11)
TOTAL_EXP varchar(5)
ENTRY_DT date
PROFILE varchar(250)
SUMMARY varchar(250)

MongoDB:

For mongo two shard servers, one config server and one mongos were satarted on the same machine with chunk size set to 10.

Sample document:

{"_id" : ObjectId("4ca6cca6a87305c90b000000"),
"ID" : "5839427",
"NAME" : "Gaurav Asthana",
"BIRTH_DT" : "1981-06-29",
"CONTACT_ADDRESS" : "Noida, India",
"CITY" : "19",
"TOTAL_EXP" : "06.10",
"ENTRY_DT" : "2010-11-26",
"PROFILE" : "zxzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzz",
"SUMMARY" : "abcfsf fsdfs gdgdfg gdfgdh dfghdh dfhdh" }

An index is also created on ID field.

I have created a simple php script to perform the benchmark. This script inserted a total of 15 Lac records both in the mysql and mongodb. I have recorded time for each batch of 100 records that were inserted. So, in total I recorded 15000 readings. The average time taken by both the databases is given below.

Average time per batch of 100 records :

Mysql : 18.77 ms
MongoDB : 5.53 ms

Size on disk:

Mysql : 390 MB
MongoDB : 1.6 GB

In my benchmark, MongoDB came out three times faster that mysql in case of insert queries. But it occupied four times more disk than mysql.