May 20, 2013

Why do we care about MySQL Performance at High Concurrency?

In many MySQL Benchmarks we can see performance compared with rather high level of concurrency. In some cases reaching 4,000 or more concurrent threads which hammer databases as quickly as possible resulting in hundreds or even thousands concurrently active queries. The question is how common is it in production ? The typical metrics to use [...]

Percona and the MariaDB Foundation

There have been several reports (1,2,3) describing Percona’s stance regarding the MariaDB Foundation that are not totally accurate so I though it would be worth it to describe where we stand on this and related matters. First, let me say the creation of theMariaDB Foundation is a good thing for the MariaDB Community and I’m [...]

Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query

Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]

Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]

Introducing tcprstat, a TCP response time tool

Ignacio Nin and I (mostly Ignacio) have worked together to create tcprstat[1], a new tool that times TCP requests and prints out statistics on them. The output looks somewhat like vmstat or iostat, but we’ve chosen the statistics carefully so you can compute meaningful things about your TCP traffic. What is this good for? In [...]

mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache

I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow query log. Maatkit includes tools which interact with these logs, [...]

High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL

We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work.  The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Web Site Optimization: FrontEnd and BackEnd

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week on Velocity Conference It was quite interesting event worth attending and it was very good to see the problems in this are going beyond Apache, PHP, Memcache and MySQL. A lot of talks on this conference was focusing on what is called “FrontEnd”. The meaning of Frontend is [...]

Apache PHP MySQL and Runaway Scripts

Sometimes due to programming error or due to very complex query you can get your PHP script running too long, well after user stopped waiting for the page to render and went browsing other sites. Looking at Server-Status I’ve seen scripts executing for hours sometimes which is obviously the problem – they take Apache Slot, [...]