May 23, 2013

Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers

So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]

How much overhead DRDB could cause ?

I was working with the customer today investigating MySQL over DRBD performance issues. His basic question was why there is so much overhead with DRBD in my case, while it is said there should be no more than 30% overhead when DRBD is used. The truth is – because how DRBD works it does not [...]

Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II

I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]

RAID and Scale Out Discussions

Just found this wonderful summary of articles by Jeremy and wanted to give some of my thoughts on the topic. First lets speak about death of the RAID. I think this is far from the case especially if you consider Software RAID here. For many workloads you would like to get RAID just for the [...]

Small things are better

Yesterday I had fun time repairing 1.5Tb ext3 partition, containing many millions of files. Of course it should have never happened – this was decent PowerEdge 2850 box with RAID volume, ECC memory and reliable CentOS 4.4 distribution but still it did. We had “journal failed” message in kernel log and filesystem needed to be [...]

Innodb Double Write

One of very interesting techniques Innodb uses is technique called “doublewrite” It means Innodb will write data twice when it performs table space writes – writes to log files are done only once. So why doublewrite is needed ? It is needed to archive data safety in case of partial page writes. Innodb does not [...]

How reliable RAID really is

This post is not exactly about MySQL Performance or about Performance at all, but I guess it should be interested to many MySQL DBAs and other people involved running MySQL In production. Recently I’ve been involved in troubleshooting Dell Poweredge 2850 system running RAID5 using 6GB internal hard drives, which give about 1.4TB of usable [...]