I Gave Five Graph Databases 256MB of RAM Each. Here's What Broke.

I Gave Five Graph Databases 256MB of RAM Each. Here's What Broke.

CognoDB Cloud's free tier gives you a graph database instance with half a CPU core and 256MB of RAM. That's not a lot. It's also, honestly, a pretty realistic starting point a lot of real side projects and early-stage products live exactly there, on whatever the free tier happens to give them, and find out the hard way what their database does under pressure.

So I decided to actually find out. I took CognoDB and lined it up against four other graph databases Neo4j AuraDB, FalkorDB, and ArangoDB gave every single one of them the same tiny resource budget, threw the same 198,050-edge dataset at all of them, and ran the same queries. No cherry-picking, no "best case" numbers. Just: here's a small VM's worth of resources, go.

One of the databases I originally planned to include never even made it into the results. It crashed on startup. Not "slow to start" a full segfault, reproducibly, across two different versions, with nothing I threw at it fixing it. More on that below, because it's honestly one of the more interesting parts of this whole thing.

The setup, quickly