When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
August 7, 2008 By 6 Comments
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
March 21, 2008 By 28 Comments
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:
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
January 24, 2008 By 30 Comments
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance
September 12, 2007 By 8 Comments
Monty Taylor posted interesting investigation of the fact read_buffer_size variable affects connection speed. This is not something you would expect right ? me too. Not only global user data is expected to be cached on startup but even if it is not why would you do full table scan to fetch single user information ? [...]
How to estimate time it takes Innodb to Recover ?
May 9, 2007 By 7 Comments
Today seems to be Innodb day in our Blog, but well this is the question which pops ups quite frequently in Innodb talks and during consulting engagements. It is well known to get better performance you should normally set innodb_log_file_size large. We however usually recommend caution as it may significantly increase recovery time if Innodb [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
June 8, 2006 By 14 Comments
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
