May 20, 2013

The write cache: Swap insanity tome III

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes

James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]

Time for Zero Administration effort at MySQL ?

Preparing Optimizing MySQL Configuration talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I noticed how many Variables did MySQL get over years – it is pushing 400 these days even if we do not count variables/options which do not have matching SHOW VARIABLES value, and settings done by changing tables rather than command line options (like much [...]

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 [...]

Different flavors of InnoDB flushing

In my recent benchmarks, such as this one about the Virident TachIon card, I used different values for innodb_buffer_pool_size, like 13GB, 52GB, and 144GB, for testing the tpcc-mysql database with size 100G. This was needed in order to test different memory/dataset size ratios. But why is it important, and how does it affect how InnoDB works [...]

MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)

This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab: a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]

InnoDB memory allocation, ulimit, and OpenSUSE

I recently encountered an interesting case. A customer reported that mysqld crashed on start on OpenSUSE 11.2 kernel 2.6.31.12-0.2-desktop x86_64   with 96 GB RAM when the innodb_buffer_pool_size was set to anything more than 62 GB. I decided to try it with 76 GB. The error message was an assert due to a failed malloc() [...]

FlashCache: first experiments

I wrote about FlashCache there, and since that I run couple benchmarks, to see what performance benefits we can expect. For initial tries I took sysbench oltp tests ( read-only and read-write) and case when data fully fits into L2 cache. I made binaries for FlashCache for CentOS 5.4, kernel 2.6.18-164.15, you can download it [...]

Tuning for heavy writing workloads

For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]