May 21, 2013

InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions

I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory. The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In [...]

How InnoDB handles REDO logging

Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.

HandlerSocket on SSD

We all enjoyed Yoshinori announcement of HandlerSocket, the plugin to MySQL which open NOSQL way to access data stored in InnoDB. The published results are impressive, but I want to understand some, that’s why I run couple more experiments. In blog post Yoshinori used the case when all data fits into memory, and one of [...]

How innodb_open_files affects performance

Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]

Tuning for heavy writing workloads

For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]

How number of columns affects performance ?

It is pretty understood the tables which have long rows tend to be slower than tables with short rows. I was interested to check if the row length is the only thing what matters or if number of columns we have to work with also have an important role. I was interested in peak row [...]

XtraDB in CPU-bound benchmark

Peter said me that previous results http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/12/18/xtradb-benchmarks-15x-gain/ are too marketing, and we should show other results also. Here is the run for CPU Bound,or it would be more correctly to say in-cache benchmark, because there is a lot of CPU remains idle. This run is exactly the same as Disk Bound but with innodb_buffer_pool_size=8G which [...]

Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase

One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]

MySQL File System Fragmentation Benchmarks

Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found:

Innodb Recovery – Is large buffer pool always better ?

How does Buffer Pool size affects Innodb Performance ? I always expected the effect to be positive, Innodb with large buffer pool to performing better. Including Recovery of course. I even blogged about it. It turns out it is not always the case. Last week I was called to help with Innodb crash recovery on [...]