Seriously - if that is a pet peeve, then you need bigger problems. I'll make it easy for you: if someone says "order of magnitude" they always mean base 10, unless otherwise noted.
"10x" is shorter, less ambiguous, and less pretentious than "order of magnitude". Same with "100x" or "1000x" compared to "orders of magnitude".
Those places where "order of magnitude" is most commonly used – especially sciences and computing – are those places where other bases are possible, and where precision matters.
Your 'make it easy for me' doesn't match my experience. Often "orders of magnitude" is used as hand-waving, to make a difference sound more impressive than the speaker is willing to go on record about. When tangible numbers arrive, it may only turn out that what was meant was 'a large multiple', less than the actual power-of-ten that was implied by the high-falutin' phrase.
If you've got a multiple in mind, and want to impress careful quantitative listeners, name the multiple. Say "around 10x" or "up to 10x" or "more than 10x". In comparison, "order of magnitude" sounds like wordy posturing.
"order of magnitude" is a deliberate way to present something as a rough estimate.
In that way it is a non-mathematical form of big-O notation.
You might prefer saying 10x or whatever, but complaining about the base is unnecessarily pedantic.
Edit: Actually, Wikipedia even says In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount (therefore, to be an order of magnitude greater is to be 10 times as large).
10. The full answer will come from benchmarks. The short answer is that it depends on the workload. But we are very confident it's going to be 10x over mysql on a ram disk for some standard workload (TPC-C).
