May 19, 2013

Stewart speaking at OSDC 2011

I’ve just arrived at ANU in Canberra for the Open Source Developers Conference 2011 (OSDC). I’ve spoken at several of the past OSDCs that have been held around Australia: 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010 and now 2011. It’s one of those conferences with great energy and great people that’s organised by dedicated members in the community [...]

Getting MySQL Core file on Linux

Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

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 [...]

Percona welcomes Stewart Smith

Percona is pleased to welcome Stewart Smith to the team. Stewart does not need an extended introduction for MySQL Community, but just in case: Stewart has a long history with both the MySQL and Drizzle code bases. He’s been one of the core Drizzle developers since the start of the project (working on Drizzle for [...]

Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer

Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]

Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query

Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]

InnoDB page sizes: plans and ideas

It is well known fact that InnoDB standard page size is 16K or 16384 bytes. Sometime ago we added feature to Percona Server to change that to 4K or 8K (innodb_page_size). That maybe useful for SSD that operates with 4K blocks and you can get really much better throughput with 4K ( however we need [...]

Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?

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 [...]

Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, March 28th

It’s time for the weekly roundup of news for Percona Server and XtraBackup. To follow up on my note from last week, we’re still checking and validating the download stats. It appears that Percona Server has been downloaded well over 100,000 times, and Percona XtraBackup has been downloaded over 200,000 times. But when we changed [...]

Percona Server and XtraBackup weekly news, March 5th

What’s new this week in Percona Server: