One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
February 17, 2012 By 10 Comments
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
June 9, 2011 By 13 Comments
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
How long Innodb Shutdown may take
September 2, 2010 By 9 Comments
How long it may take MySQL with Innodb tables to shut down ? It can be quite a while. In default configuration innodb_fast_shutdown=ON the main job Innodb has to do to complete shutdown is flushing dirty buffers. The number of dirty buffers in the buffer pool varies depending on innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct as well as workload and [...]
On Benchmarks on SSD
July 14, 2010 By 3 Comments
(cross post from SSD Performance Blog ) To get meaningful performance results on SSD storage is not easy task, let’s see why. There is graph from sysbench fileio random write benchmark with 4 threads. The results were taken on PCI-E SSD card ( I do not want to name vendor here, as the problem is [...]
How is join_buffer_size allocated?
July 5, 2010 By 9 Comments
When examining MySQL configuration, we quite often want to know how various buffer sizes are used. This matters because some buffers (sort_buffer_size for example) are allocated to their full size immediately as soon as they are needed, but others are effectively a “max size” and the corresponding buffers are allocated only as big as needed [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
February 12, 2009 By 17 Comments
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.
The performance effects of new patches
September 9, 2008 By 14 Comments
We are going to show the effects of the new patches applied to Percona HighPerf release. As you see from the following graphs, there is significant difference to normal version when the data bigger than buffer pool (right graph shows CPU usage)
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
July 17, 2006 By 40 Comments
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]
MySQL Server Memory Usage
May 17, 2006 By 21 Comments
Every so often people ask me the question how should they estimate memory consumption by MySQL Server in given configuration. What is the formula they could use. The reasons to worry about memory usage are quite understandable. If you configure MySQL Server so it uses too small amount of memory it will likey perform suboptimally. [...]
