Side by side installations of MySQL

We're currently running MySQL 5.0.36sp1, and I'd like to evaluate whether we would get any kind of performance gain in running a more recent version. Can I safely install a newer version and run it on a diffe开发者_StackOverflow中文版rent port without affecting my existing instance?

Ideally, I'd be able to turn on one instance at a time, and run the same tests on each instance.

You'd have to give it a different:

• port
• socket
• pidfile
• datadir

But that's about it.

Yes it is possible. Although deprecated by 5.1, this

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/instance-manager.html

might be the easiest solution to what you are looking for.