Introducing DoomBench - Can Your Data Stack Run DOOM?

Summary

Can Your Data Stack Run DOOM?TL;DRWe ran a multiplayer DOOM server in pure SQL on different data stack architectures, recorded nice videos, and measured what breaks first.Click here to go directly to the benchmark page (with videos).Here is a video of CedarDB being “DOOMbench”-ed: Your browser does not support the video tag.Why DOOM?Pedantic note: The original DOOMQL uses raycasting, not BSP trees, making it technically more Wolfenstein than DOOM as some people pointed out.Last year, we published DOOMQL: a multiplayer DOOM-like game running entirely inside SQL, using recursive CTEs for raycasting and a real client-server architecture where players connect directly to the database. We were very excited when it hit the front page of Hacker News. DOOMBench builds on DOOMQL and turns it into a stress-test for different data stacks. Latency numbers and throughput charts are easy to report but hard to feel. A video of a database struggling to render a video game frame can be felt instantly!Let’s look at the three dimensions DOOMQL covers:Raw analytical performance: DOOMQL uses recursive CTEs to render a game world in ASCII-art using raycasting. That’s as number-crunchy as SQL gets! Some might interject that this is not a workload representative of the real world, to which I reply: Might be true, but there’s precedence.Transaction Processing: DOOMQL uses a client-server architecture. Clients connect directly to the database and insert their inputs into an inputs table: WASD to move, X to shoot. That’s not going to be a lot of transactions (think: 10 players sending an input every 200 ms each -> 50 transactions per second), but latency is a big issue here. If you’ve ever played a multiplayer shooter with a high ping, you understand. Furthermore, there’s also a game loop the server has to run multiple times a second. This can reach from 100 ticks per minute (Runescape) to 128 ticks per second (Valorant).Atomicity: Nothing feels worse than being shot by a player who was alrea...