A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
Intel 320 SSD read performance
(this is cross-post from http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/) While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups. Intel 320 SSD appears to be a popular drive with a quite acceptable price. I wrote about write performance of these [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or [...]
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.
MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive
As we can see, MySQL 5.5.8 comes with great improvements and scalability fixes. Adding up all the new features, you have a great release. However, there is one area I want to touch on in this post. At Percona, we consider it important not only to have the best peak performance, but also stable and predictable performance. I refer you [...]
HandlerSocket on SSD
We all enjoyed Yoshinori announcement of HandlerSocket, the plugin to MySQL which open NOSQL way to access data stored in InnoDB. The published results are impressive, but I want to understand some, that’s why I run couple more experiments. In blog post Yoshinori used the case when all data fits into memory, and one of [...]
FlashCache: first experiments
I wrote about FlashCache there, and since that I run couple benchmarks, to see what performance benefits we can expect. For initial tries I took sysbench oltp tests ( read-only and read-write) and case when data fully fits into L2 cache. I made binaries for FlashCache for CentOS 5.4, kernel 2.6.18-164.15, you can download it [...]
Should I buy a Fast SSD or more memory?
While a scale-out solution has traditionally been popular for MySQL, it’s interesting to see what room we now have to scale up – cheap memory, fast storage, better power efficiency. There certainly are a lot of options now – I’ve been meeting about a customer/week using Fusion-IO cards. One interesting choice I’ve seen people make [...]
Index lock and adaptive search – next two biggest InnoDB problems
Running many benchmarks on fast storage (FusionIO, SSDs) and multi-cores CPUs system I constantly face two contention problems. So I suspect it’s going to be next biggest issues to make InnoDB scaling on high-end system. This is also reason why in benchmarks I posted previously CPU usage is only about 50%, leaving other 50% in [...]

