This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?
A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing
We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.
Connecting orphaned .ibd files
There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
What is innodb_support_xa?
A common misunderstanding about innodb_support_xa is that it enables user-initiated XA transactions, that is, transactions that are prepared and then committed on multiple systems, with an external transaction coordinator. This is actually not precisely what this option is for. It enables two-phase commit in InnoDB (prepare, then commit). This is necessary not only for user-initiated [...]
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.

