Graviton 4 (r8g) is now available on Aurora in the Tokyo region! Performance comparison with other Graviton generations
This is Onkai Yuta (@fat47) from the Service Reliability Group (SRG) of the Media Headquarters.
#SRG(Service Reliability Group) is a group that mainly provides cross-sectional support for the infrastructure of our media services, improving existing services, launching new ones, and contributing to OSS.
This article summarizes the availability of Graviton4 (r8g) in the Tokyo region of AWS Aurora and the results of a performance comparison.
I hope this helps in some way.
Graviton4 (r8g) released in Tokyo regionWhat is the performance difference between the previous generation (r7g) and the generation before that (r6g)?About feesPerformance comparison using sysbenchConclusion
Graviton4 (r8g) released in Tokyo region
Aurora's Graviton 4 (r8g) support was released in November 2024. At that time, it was only available in certain regions, such as US East (Northern Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon).
With Graviton3 (r7g), it took more than a year for it to arrive in the Tokyo region, so I was not too worried, but Graviton4 was released in the Tokyo region on March 14, 2025.
I'm so happy that you're coming to the Tokyo region in just 4 months!
What is the performance difference between the previous generation (r7g) and the generation before that (r6g)?
Quote from the release article:
Achieve up to 40% better performance and up to 29% better price/performance compared to comparably sized Graviton3-based instances for Amazon Aurora databases at on-demand prices
Up to 40% performance improvement from r7g to r8gThere seems to be.
By the way, the release article for r7g stated the following:
Get up to 30% better performance and up to 20% better price/performance compared to Amazon Aurora's Graviton2 instances.
r6g → r7g up to 30%They said there would be performance improvements.
In other words…
Does this mean that if you change from Graviton2 (r6g) to Graviton4 (r8g), the maximum performance improvement is 82%?
This needs to be verified...!
About fees
Let's compare the on-demand standard rates for the same sizes, r6g.large to r8g.large.
| Instance type | Hourly rate (on demand) | Price difference from previous generation |
|---|---|---|
| db.r6g.large | USD 0.313 | 0% |
| db.r7g.large | USD 0.333 | +6.39% |
| db.r8g.large | USD 0.333 | +0% |
The Graviton 3 (r7g) and Graviton 4 (r8g) were the same price. I also compared other sizes and they were almost the same price.
In addition,Reserved instances for Graviton4 (r8g) are not yet available in the USIt seems so.
Performance comparison using sysbench
As with the last time Graviton3 (r7g) was released, we will use sysbench to check the performance.
Please refer to this article for information on installing sysbench and commands.
r8g can createAurora MySQL v3.08 or higherTherefore, this time we unified the engine version to v3.08.1 for all instance types and re-measured the performance check values.
| Engine Version | v3.08.1 (MySQL 8.0.39 compatible) |
| Loading environment | c7a.xlarge (same AZ) |
I ran it three times on each instance. I didn't take into account the difficulty of clearing the cache in Aurora.
The average values of the three measurements are summarized below.
| read | write | other | total | transactions | queries | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| r6g | 273,014 | 78,194 | 39,097 | 390,973 | 19,548 (325per sec) | 390,973 (6514per sec) |
| r7g | 326,778 | 93,841 | 46,587 | 465,873 | 23,294 (388per sec) | 465,873 (7763per sec) |
| r8g | 351,008 | 100,288 | 50,144 | 501,440 | 25,072 (417per sec) | 501,440 (8356per sec) |
The performance ratio of transactions was summarized as follows:
| Performance difference with r6g | Performance difference from previous generation | |
|---|---|---|
| r6g | - | - |
| r7g | + 19.16% | + 19.16% |
| r8g | + 28.26% | + 7.63% |
Oh...? Something's not what I expected...?
When I tested this in a previous blog post, I found that upgrading from r6g to r7g improved performance by about 34%.
Previously, we were using engine version v3.04 (compatible with MySQL 8.0.28),
I will create another cluster with v3.04.3 and try to re-take the scores for r6g and r7g.
This was also measured three times and the average value was recorded.
| read | write | other | total | transactions | queries | |
| r6g(v3.04.3) | 235,456 | 67,273 | 33,636 | 336,366 | 16,818 (280per sec) | 336,366 (5605per sec) |
| r7g(v3.04.3) | 284,624 | 81,321 | 40,660 | 406,606 | 20,330 (338per sec) | 406,606 (6775per sec) |
| Differences from r6g (v3.04.3) | + 20.88% | + 20.88% | + 20.88% | + 20.88% | + 20.88% | + 20.88% |
For some reason, it's only about a 20% improvement. I wonder why...
Conclusion
Graviton4 (r8g) is now available in the Tokyo region.
It's true that performance has improved, and the price has remained the same from the previous generation, so it looks very good.
On the other hand, reserved instances are not yet available, so those who have purchased Graviton2 (r6g) will likely need to compare options.
Also, since Graviton4 cannot be used with the LTS version 3.04, it seems necessary to take this into consideration.
I am writing an article in this breaking news, but the verification results are not quite satisfactory, so
I would be grateful if you could try out the performance comparison test and let me know the results.
SRG is looking for people to work with us.
If you're interested, please contact us here.