The strange thing happens over the time when I try to google for 'apache ignite' - Hazelcast's advertisement bubbles up to the top of the list suggesting that Hazelcast is up to 50% faster than Apache Ignite:

General Benchmarking

The simplest way to benchmark a distributed platform like Apache Ignite or Hazelcast is to launch a cluster of several machines and run a client process that will produce the load and gather the benchmarking results. For the sake of general benchmarking, a cluster of 4 server/data nodes was prepared on AWS and the load was coming from a single client machine (aka. application). Yardstick was used as a benchmarking framework. All the parameters and instructions are listed below:

AWS EC 2 Configuration
EC 2 Instance	r4.2xlarge
CPU	8
RAM	61 GB
OS	Ubuntu 16.04
Java	Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 1.8.0_121-b13 Oracle Corporation Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 25.121-b13

Yardstick Configuration
Nodes	1 Client, 4 Servers
Threads	64
Backups	1, Synchronous
Running Yardstick on Amazon	https://github.com/apacheignite/yardstick-ignite#running-on-amazon
Yardstick and Clusters Configurations	https://github.com/gridgain/yardstick/tree/master/results/HZ-3.8.1-vs-IGNITE-1.9-c-1-s-4-sm-FULL_SYNC-b-1

Following "Running Yardstick on Amazon" instruction with provided configurations we can reproduce these numbers:


Complete results: https://github.com/gridgain/yardstick/tree/master/results/HZ-3.8.1-vs-IGNITE-1.9-c-1-s-4-sm-FULL_SYNC-b-1

It's obvious that Apache Ignite 1.9 significantly outperforms Hazelcast 3.8.1 in most of the basic operations pulling ahead on up to 160% in some of the scenarios.

At the same time, we can see that Hazelcast performs better in some atomic operations going ahead Apache Ignite on up to 4%. Honestly, that's great to know that there is still a room for performance improvements in Apache Ignite and that Hazelcast doesn't make the life of Ignite's performance engineers easier.

However, after that performance loss was spotted it was decided to run the same set of the benchmarks but under the higher load that is more relevant to production scenarios - the load was generated by 8 client machines (aka. applications) rather than by a single one.  The results were surprising and uplifting as we can see from the next section.

Put More Load

Yardstick Configuration
Nodes	8 Client, 4 Servers
Yardstick and Clusters Configurations	https://github.com/gridgain/yardstick/tree/master/results/HZ-3.8.1-vs-IGNITE-1.9-c-8-s-4-sm-FULL_SYNC-b-1

At all, after the total number of client machines was increased from 1 to 8 the following numbers were reproduced:


Complete results: https://github.com/gridgain/yardstick/tree/master/results/HZ-3.8.1-vs-IGNITE-1.9-c-8-s-4-sm-FULL_SYNC-b-1

These are the numbers taken from one of the client machines. To get the total number of operations per second we just need to accumulate all of them. In any case, looking at the results now we see that Apache Ignite beats Hazelcast even under the higher load for every benchmark.

For instance, Apache Ignite ANSI-99 SQL engine now outperforms Hazelcast's predicates-based querying engine on 200% while in the 1 client machine scenario the difference was only around 80%.

Even more, Apache Ignite took a lead at all the atomic benchmarks jumping from 4% it lost to Hazelcast before to victorious 42% for atomic-put-get-bs-6 scenario.

The Upshot

It's always up to you to decide what kind of product to use in production. But the golden rule is that you shouldn't blindly follow official numbers or data prepared by a vendor. Use all the information as a basement and then get to know a product and test it for your own scenario. Only this way you will find out which product suits your case more.