May 25, 2013

InnoDB Full-text Search in MySQL 5.6: Part 2, The Queries!

This is part 2 in a 3 part series. In part 1, we took a quick look at some initial configuration of InnoDB full-text search and discovered a little bit of quirky behavior; here, we are going to run some queries and compare the result sets. Our hope is that the one of two things [...]

Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer

Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]

How innodb_open_files affects performance

Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]

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 [...]

Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB

Accidentally me and Baron played with InfoBright (see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/29/quick-comparison-of-myisam-infobright-and-monetdb/) this week. And following Baron’s example I also run the same load against MonetDB. Reading comments to Baron’s post I tied to load the same data to LucidDB, but I was not successful in this. I tried to analyze a bigger dataset and I took public [...]

PHP vs. BIGINT vs. float conversion caveat

Sometimes you need to work with big numbers in PHP (gulp). For example, sometimes 32-bit identifiers are not enough and you have to use BIGINT 64-bit ids; e.g. if you are encoding additional information like the server ID into high bits of the ID. I had already written about the mess that 64-bit integers are [...]

Microslow patch for 5.1.20

Microslow patch has been there for some time, but only for earlier MySQL editions such as 4.1 and 5.0. Now it’s also available for the latest 5.1. Because MySQL went through a lot of internal changes, the patch had to be written from scratch. It introduces some minor change in existing functionality and also adds [...]

Integers in PHP, running with scissors, and portability

Until recently I thought that currently popular scripting languages, which mostly evolved over last 10 years or something, must allow for easier portability across different platforms compared to ye good olde C/C++. After all, their development started a few decades after C, so its notorious caveats are all well-known and should be easy to avoid [...]

MySQL automatic data truncation can backfire

I had a fun case today. There is set of cache tables which cache certain content in MyISAM tables and queries for these tables such as:

The “key” is CRC32 of the real key which is used to keep index size as small as possible so if we have a cache miss we can [...]