LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
Spreading .ibd files across multiple disks; the optimization that isn’t
Inspired by Baron’s earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently – “If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it’s own .ibd file. You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location.” There are a few things wrong with this advice:
EC2/EBS single and RAID volumes IO benchmark
During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID [...]
Disaster: LVM Performance in Snapshot Mode
In many cases I speculate how things should work based on what they do and in number of cases this lead me forming too good impression about technology and when running in completely unanticipated bug or performance bottleneck. This is exactly the case with LVM Number of customers have reported the LVM gives very high [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot
We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]
MySQL Performance Engineer opening
As you know we love to analyze performance of various MySQL features, benchmark, compare, analyze things and post our findings on MySQL Performance Blog. However recently we got too busy with serving out customers and the backlog of things to take a look and write about is just growing larger and larger. So we decided [...]

