In my raw IO benchmark of Intel 520 SSD we saw that the drive does not provide uniform throughput and response time, but it is interesting how does it affect workload if it comes from MySQL. I prepared benchmarks results for Sysbench OLTP workload with MySQL running on Intel 520. You can download it there.

Sysbench has three distribution for random numbers: uniform, special and gaussian. I mostly use uniform and special, and I feel that both do not fully reflect my needs when I run benchmarks. Uniform is stupidly simple: for a table with 1 mln rows, each row gets equal amount of hits. This barely reflects real system, [...]

As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]

Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]

My previous post I finished with the graph with unstable results. There I won’t analyze causes, but rather I want to show some different ways to present results.