Comparison of geolocation binary databases and their drivers: GeoIP, Sypex Geo, TabGeo

A specific feature of this test is a certain proximity to real conditions, when there is a need to determine the country of one visitor on the fly for one script launch, that is: one script launch — one ip-address . In similar testing from zapimir , a different principle was used, which, it seems to me, has little to do with the real need: one script launch - the definition of several thousand ip-addresses in a loop.

The first thing we will do is compare the bases:

Developer	Base	Update Date	Number of ranges, thousand	Size of base, Kb
Geoip	GeoLite Country	2014.06.03	93	688
Sypex geo	Sypex Geo Country	2014.06.20	90	365
Tabgeo	tabgeo_country_v4	2014.06.20	200	998

Sypex Geo boasts the smallest base of all presented, but also the lowest accuracy (90,000 ranges). TabGeo has the highest accuracy - 200,000 ranges, but, therefore, the most plump base. GeoIP - in all respects occupies an intermediate position. All databases currently have regular updates.

And now let's proceed directly to testing the performance of different databases. A special feature of testing was determining the time of the script to determine one ip-address per launch, then the data was interpreted into the number of launches for one second.

Developer	Base	Requests per second (median)
Geoip	GeoLite Country	460
Sypex geo	Sypex Geo Country	910
Tabgeo	tabgeo_country_v4	1400

The table shows that the most unhurried solution for geolocation is GeoIP - only 460 requests per second, for the most common and popular solution - this is very bad, and I would like to note that MaxMind's GeoIP2 is not a way out of this situation (this is more information base, than the base for geolocation).

The silver medalist of this competition is the base and the driver from Sypex Geo - 910 hits per second, which is two times better than the results shown by GeoIP. But the absolute leader in this nomination is TabGeo - 1400 requests per second under equal conditions, which is more than 1.5 times better than Sypex Geo.
')
Also, a small performance increase gives a smaller number of disk accesses, the comparison provided: one definition of the country - one launch of the script, showed that the minimum value of this parameter for TabGeo is from 1 to 3 disk operations, for Sypex Geo - 4 and the full outsider in this GeoIP is a comparison - from 23 to 52 per one initialization and one country definition by ip-address.

An important value is the memory size occupied by the script: TabGeo - 26 Kb, Sypex Geo - 110 Kb and GeoIP - 285 Kb.

From the presented data we can conclude that the most popular geo - location solution GeoIP is at the same time the worst for real projects. Sypex Geo - occupies an intermediate position in this hierarchy. Well, the absolute leader in almost all parameters (from the presented bases) is TabGeo .

Sites tested bases:
Tabgeo
Sypex geo
Geoip