We’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.3, with a couple of major improvements and many minor ones. You can download it, read the documentation, and get support for it. What’s new? You can read the changelog for the details, but here are the highlights: Brand new pt-diskstats, thanks to Brian Fraser. This tool is completely rewritten, and [...]
The four fundamental performance metrics
April 27, 2011 By 15 Comments
There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]
Performance or Stability ???
April 1, 2011 By 16 Comments
Sometimes the question is put like are you looking for Performance OR Stability, which I believe is a strange way to put it. In real life systems you care both about Performance AND Stability. I would even say Stability is a not the best world here, I would day you care about your minimal performance [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
March 8, 2011 By 1 Comment
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
February 21, 2011 By 55 Comments
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 well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool ?
December 9, 2010 By 12 Comments
Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide [...]
Getting History of Table Sizes in MySQL
December 8, 2010 By 13 Comments
One data point which is very helpful but surprisingly few people have is the history of the table sizes. Projection of data growth is very important component for capacity planning and simply watching the growth of space used on partition is not very helpful. Now as MySQL 5.0+ has information schema collecting and keeping this [...]
Percona white paper: Forecasting MySQL Scalability
November 16, 2010 By 6 Comments
Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers. One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the [...]
Introducing tcprstat, a TCP response time tool
August 31, 2010 By 13 Comments
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 [...]
Announcing Training for Operations Teams
August 18, 2010 By 3 Comments
We’re opening up registration for our new training courses today. In short: we are moving from two days to a new four-day format. The new additions are created by: Splitting our current InnoDB day in half. We now have one day for DBAs, and one day just on InnoDB topics. A new Operations Day – covering [...]
