I have varying levels of familiarity with Google’s original leveldb and three of its derivatives. RocksDB is one of the three. In each of the four leveldb offerings, the code is optimized for a given environment. Google’s leveldb is optimized for a cell phone, which has much more limited resources than a server. RocksDB is optimized for flash arrays on a large servers (per various Rocksdb wiki pages). Note that a flash array is a device of much higher throughput than a SATA or SSD drive or array. It is a device that sits on the processor’s bus. RocksDB’s performance benchmark page details a server with 24 logical CPU cores, 144GB ram, and two FusionIO flash PCI devices. Each FusionIO device cost about $10,000 at the time of the post. So RocksDB is naturally tuned for extremely fast and expensive systems. Here is an example Arangodb import on a machine similar to the RocksDB performance tester: Read more