1.4.4.What is the cost to search on a given property?

If we are looking for equality matches, a single 2GHz core can do about 250,000 single triple random lookups per second as long as disk reads are not involved. If each triple requires a disk seek the number is naturally lower.

Parallelism depends on the query. With a query like counting all x and y such that x knows y and y knows x, we get up to 3.4 million single-triple lookups-per-second on a cluster of 2 8-core Xeon servers. With complex nested sub-queries the parallelism may be less.

Lookups involving ranges of values, such as ranges of geographical coordinates or dates use an index, since quads are indexed in a manner that collates in the natural order of the data type.