Despite being standard Innodb feature forever Insert Buffers remains some kind of mysterious thing for a lot of people, so let me try to explain thing a little bit. Innodb uses insert buffer to “cheat” and not to update index leaf pages when at once but “buffer” such updates so several updates to the same [...]
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
The performance effects of new patches
We are going to show the effects of the new patches applied to Percona HighPerf release. As you see from the following graphs, there is significant difference to normal version when the data bigger than buffer pool (right graph shows CPU usage)
Wanted: Better memory profiling for MySQL
Quite frequently I would log in to customers system and find MySQL using too much memory. I would look at memory consumed by Innodb (it is often higher than innodb_buffer_pool_size) substract memory used by other global buffers such as query_cache_size and key_buffer and will in many cases see some mysterous memory which I can’t really [...]
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 [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
Query Profiling with MySQL: Bypassing caches
Quite frequently I run into question like this “I’m using SQL_NO_CACHE but my query is still much faster second time I run it, why is that ? The answer to this question is simple – because SQL_NO_CACHE only bypasses query cache but it has no change on other caches, which are MySQL Caches – Innodb [...]
Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance
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 ? [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

