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 [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
June 9, 2011 By 18 Comments
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)
December 21, 2010 By 11 Comments
This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab:Â a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive
December 20, 2010 By 25 Comments
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 [...]
FlashCache: tpcc workload with FusionIO card as cache
June 2, 2010 By 20 Comments
This run is very similar what I had on Intel SSD X25-M card, but now I use FusionIO 80GB SLC card. I chose this card as smallest available card (and therefore cheapest. On Dell.com you can see it for about $3K). There is also FusionIO IO-Xtreme 80GB card, which is however MLC based and it [...]
Should I buy a Fast SSD or more memory?
April 8, 2010 By 10 Comments
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 [...]
Why you don’t want to shard.
August 6, 2009 By 34 Comments
Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.
The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.
So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.
Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons
Looking on 5.4 – IO bound benchmarks
April 30, 2009 By 5 Comments
With a lot of talks around 5.4 I decided to check how it works in our benchmarks. For first shoot I took tpcc-like IO-bound benchmark (100W, ~10GB of data, 3GB buffer_pool) and tested it on our Dell PowerEdge R900 box (16 cores, 32GB of RAM, RAID 10 on 8 SAS 2.5″ 15K RPM disks). For [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
March 9, 2009 By 18 Comments
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
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 [...]
