Benchmarking Replication in Cassandra and MongoDB NoSQL Datastores

The proliferation in Web 2.0 applications has increased the volume, velocity, and variety of data sources which have exceeded the limitations and expected use cases of traditional relational DBMSs. Cloud serving NoSQL data stores address these concerns and provide replication mechanisms to ensure fault tolerance, high availability, and improved scalability. In this paper, we empirically explore the impact of replication on the performance of Cassandra and MongoDB NoSQL datastores. We evaluate the impact of replication in comparison to non-replicated clusters of equal size hosted on a private cloud environment. Our benchmarking experiments are conducted for read and write heavy workloads subject to different access distributions and tunable consistency levels. Our results demonstrate that replication must be taken into consideration in empirical and modelling studies in order to achieve an accurate evaluation of the performance of these datastores.