"InnoDB is commonly viewed as anything but performant, especially when compared to MyISAM. Many actually call it slow. This view is mostly supported by old facts and mis-information. In reality, you would be very hard-pressed to find a current, production-quality MySQL Database Engine with the CPU efficiency of InnoDB. It has its performance "quirks" and there are definitely workloads for which it is not optimal, but for standard OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) loads, it is tough to find a better, safer fit.
"The performance claims for InnoDB are not idle, there are numbers to back it up and benchmarks run by some of the most well-respected MySQL consulting firms in existence. For example, the people behind mysqlperformanceblog.com, a leading MySQL tuning and optimization site run by Percona, ran a benchmark comparing Falcon, MyISAM and InnoDB..."
