MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
Intel Woodcrest vs AMD Opteron for MySQL
AnandTech published Intel Woodcrest preview benchmarks which have some numbers for MySQL as well. From these numbers performance looks great and it looks like finally Intel has something to respond to AMD Opterons on Server market. Now competition heats up and we’ll see what AMD will have to respond. As Opteron did not have serious [...]
Are larger buffers always better ?
Sometimes I see people thinking about buffers as “larger is always better” so if “large” MySQL sample configuration is designed for 2GB and they happen to have 16, they would simply multiply all/most values by 10 and hope it will work well. Obviously it does not. The least problem would be wasting memory, allocating a [...]
InnoDB thread concurrency
InnoDB has a mechanism to regulate count of threads working inside InnoDB. innodb_thread_concurrency is variable which set this count, and there are two friendly variables innodb_thread_sleep_delay and innodb_concurrency_tickets. I’ll try to explain how it works. MySQL has pluginable architecture which divides work between mysql common code (parser, optimizer) and storage engine. From storage engine’s point [...]
InnoDB page size
As maybe you know InnoDB uses hard page size 16Kb for datafiles and for buffer pool. However this size can be changed if you need it for your workload. go to file innobase/include/univ.i, lines: /* The universal page size of the database */ #define UNIV_PAGE_SIZE (2 * 8192) /* NOTE! Currently, this has to be [...]
Indexes in MySQL
MySQL does not always make a right decision about indexes usage. Condsider a simple table: CREATE TABLE `t2` ( `ID` int(11) default NULL, `ID1` int(11) default NULL, `SUBNAME` varchar(32) default NULL, KEY `ID1` (`ID1`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t2 ; 250001 (V1) SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t2 WHERE ID1=1 ; 83036 (V2) (execution [...]

