Counting bytes is the wrong thing to do (for old disks). If you count disk seeks (as you should), LSM trees are a lot better than B-trees, but it turns out you

Counting bytes is the wrong thing to do (for old disks). If you count disk seeks (as you should), LSM trees are a lot better than B-trees, but it turns out you sacrifice more read performance than you should. On SSDs, you do want to count bytes, and in this case, LSM trees do exhibit write amplification and it is a big deal. When your disks have a limited lifetime, even doing 3x the writes you need to hurts a lot. (Not trying to spam, I just don't want to type the same thing twice, but) I explain this better here: http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths-comparison-clarifications-part-2/ http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths-comp...