Updating Mysql Or Changing To Mariadb On Existing Installation

I am currently running a CS-Cart installation on an older dedicated server with DB performance issues (Out of Memory kill for MySQL).

My hosting company recommends upgrading MySQL from 5.5.61-ccl to 5.7 or Maria 10.2 for better performance and migrating to a server with more ram since I am maxed at 4 GB currently.

What issues might I run into upgrading MySQL to a newer version or to MariaDB?

Current specs:

- CS-Cart v 4.8.2.SP2

- server hardware: older 4-core Xeon, 4 GB ram (max), 1TB SSD

- Server software: Apache 2.4.24, PHP 7.1.24, MySQL 5.5.61-ccl

Hosting company recommends new server which I just rented and will migrate to...

- Server hardware: Xeon E3-1270 v6, 32 GB ram, 1 TB SSD

- I also plan on switching to PHP 7.2 in the coming weeks.

Oops! I re-posted this in the general forum for "Configuration"

How did this turn out for you?

We've been converting many sites over to MariaDB without any issues since WHM/Cpanel offers it as the recommended configuration for DB server.

There's all sorts of db optimization that can be done in the config files depedning on what type of catalog you have.

We have clients running MySQL and Maria DB with 250,000 - 500,000 products and it's as fast as any other system running 300 - 1000.

We actually setup our system on Dedicated host with 12 Cores and 16GB of memory. It was also running on MariaDB.

Performance was pretty dismal so I did an experiment and loaded up the system on a mini AWS instance -- 1 core, 2GB of RAM running MySQL.

Oddly enough, performance was 5 times better on the AWS instance, at least for a single user. The hosting company checked, reviewed, checked some more and based on what I could see, it was configured correctly.

So, the Hosted system was CentOS and MariaDB and the AWS was Ubuntu and MySQL.

One day i will find out why the performance was that much poorer, but for now we are trying to figure out why we have performance issues going into one category (another post her on the forum).