MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB
I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.
Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server
Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]
Multiple MySQL instances on Fusion-io ioDrive
It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware. Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card. Full report is available in PDF
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
table_cache negative scalability
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
XtraDB: The Top 10 enhancements
Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop. Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1. Building this list was not really a scientific [...]
Call for opinions: Do we need MySQL 5.0 with MySQL 5.4 performance
MySQL 5.4 comes with Innodb engine which seems to have much better performance than MySQL 5.0 – this is due to locking and IO patches from Google integrated in this release (which are similar to appropriate Percona patches) as well as some unique fixes such as different innodb_thread_concurrency handling and other optimization. Should we take [...]
Compression for InnoDB backup
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current multi-core word the compression utility should utilize several CPU to speedup operation, [...]
XtraDB storage engine release 1.0.2-3 (Spring edition) codename Sapporo
Today we announce release 1.0.2-3 of our XtraDB storage engine. Here is a list of enhancements: Move to MySQL 5.1.31 Scalability fix — ability to use several rollback segments Increasing the number of rseg may be helpful for CPU scale of write-intentional workloads. See benchmark results. Scalability fix — replaced page_hash mutex to page_hash read-write [...]

