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 [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Four ways to optimize paginated displays
September 24, 2008 By 27 Comments
A paginated display is one of the top optimization scenarios we see in the real world. Search results pages, leaderboards, and most-popular lists are good examples. You know the design pattern: display 20 results in some most-relevant order. Show a “next” and “previous” link. And usually, show how many items are in the whole list [...]
Recovering Innodb table Corruption
July 4, 2008 By 21 Comments
Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]
Is disk Everything for MySQL Performance ?
April 25, 2008 By 7 Comments
I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can’t say I agree on all points. First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying “You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many [...]
TPC-H Run on MySQL 5.1 and 6.0
April 10, 2008 By 16 Comments
We were doing MySQL Performance evaluation on TPC-H queries for the client and they kindly allowed us to publish results which are very interesting. This is obviously not audited TPC-H run, and it can’t be because we used MyISAM tables which are not ACID complaint. Plus we only measured Power to keep things simple. We [...]
10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL
November 13, 2007 By 20 Comments
People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
November 3, 2007 By 39 Comments
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
MySQL VIEW as performance troublemaker
August 12, 2007 By 55 Comments
I start to see applications being built utilizing VIEWs functionality which appeared in MySQL 5.0 and quite frequently VIEWs are used to help in writing the queries – to keep queries simple without really thinking how it affects server performance. Even worse than that – looking at the short table which just gets single row [...]
Implementing efficient counters with MySQL
July 1, 2007 By 16 Comments
On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view. The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way – they [...]
