Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 2: Determining Peak Throughput
This is a continuation of my series of benchmark posts comparing Amazon RDS to a server running on Amazon EC2. Upcoming posts (probably 6 or 8 in total) will extend the scope of the benchmark to include data on our Dell r900 with traditional hard drives in RAID10, and a server in the Joyent cloud. [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 1: insert performance
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud-hosted MySQL solution. I’ve had some clients hitting performance limitations on standard EC2 servers with EBS volumes (see SSD versus EBS death match), and one of them wanted to evaluate RDS as a replacement. It is built on the same technologies, but the hardware and networking are supposed [...]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
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 [...]
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 6 – Publishing server location
This post is the sixth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have an HA MySQL service running on EC2. We now need to find a way to point the web servers or application servers to the HA MySQL service. Normally, in an HA setup, this is [...]
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 5 – The instance monitoring script
This post is the fifth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have nearly everything setup, only a few pieces are missing. One of the missing pieces is the Pacemaker script that run on the MySQL instance.
Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables (revisited)
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Sharing an auto_increment value across multiple MySQL tables. In the comments, a few people wrote in to suggest alternative ways of implementing this. I just got around to benchmarking those alternatives today across two large EC2 machines:
High availability for MySQL on Amazon EC2 – Part 5 – The instance monitoring script
This post is the fifth of a series that started here. From the previous posts of this series, we now have an instance restart script that can restart the database node in case of failure and automatically reconfigure Pacemaker and the other servers that needs to access the MySQL server. What we will cover in [...]
Percona Server with XtraDB Case Study, Behind the Scenes
We’ve published our first case study. The customer, ideeli, had a database that was struggling on standard MySQL and InnoDB. The big win was the upgrade to XtraDB. The business continued to grow quickly, and months later under much more traffic, the database is still outperforming their previous version. I thought I’d write a few [...]

