May 22, 2013

Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase

One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]

Economics of Performance Optimization

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]

Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II

I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]

How fast can you sort data with MySQL ?

I took the same table as I used for MySQL Group by Performance Tests to see how much MySQL can sort 1.000.000 rows, or rather return top 10 rows from sorted result set which is the most typical way sorting is used in practice. I tested full table scan of the table completes in 0.22 [...]

PHP Large result sets and summary tables.

We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security. One of the process web [...]

InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1

Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]

Thoughts on MySQL Replication

Brian Aker recently published good write up about using MySQL replication. The piece I find missing however is good description of warning about limits of this approach as well as things you need to watch out for. You can call me person with negative mind but I tend to think about limits as well. So [...]

Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size

If you’re doing significant amount of writes to Innodb tables decent size of innodb_log_file_size is important for MySQL Performance. However setting it too large will increase recovery time, so in case of MySQL crash or power failure it may take long time before MySQL Server is operational again. So how to find the optimal combination [...]

MySQL Server Memory Usage

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. [...]