May 25, 2013

Goal driven performance optimization

When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]

When to use Hardware upgrade instead of Software Optimization

One typical question which frequently pops up is whenever it is better to use hardware upgrade or optimize software more. I already wrote about it, for example here. Today I’ll look at the same topic from the consultants view. When consultant should suggest hardware upgrade and when it is not in a simple checklist form.

RAID System performance surprises

Implementing MySQL database in 24/7 environments we typically hope for uniform component performance, or at least would like to be able to control it. Typically this is indeed the case, for example CPU will perform with same performance day and night (unless system management software decides to lower CPU frequency due to overheating). This is [...]

Performance impact of complex queries

What is often underestimated is impact of MySQL Performance by complex queries on large data sets(ie some large aggregate queries) and batch jobs. It is not rare to see queries which were taking milliseconds to stall for few seconds, especially in certain OS configurations, and on low profile servers (ie having only one disk drive) [...]