This is to follow up my previous post with kernel_mutex problem. First, I may have an explanation why the performance degrades to significantly and why innodb_sync_spin_loops may fix it. Second, if that is correct ( or not, but we can try anyway), than playing with innodb_thread_concurrency also may help. So I ran some benchmarks with [...]
Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket
It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes [...]
Percona Server 5.5.8 Beta Release
It’s finally here! Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.8-20.0 is now available for download. This is a beta release of Percona’s enhancements to the MySQL 5.5.8 server. Here are some highlights: Performance and scalability improvements throughout the server and storage engine Optimizations for flash storage such as SSD, Virident, and FusionIO Optimizations for cloud computing The [...]
Percona Server 5.1.54-12.5
Percona Server version 5.1.54-12.5 is now available for download. It is now the current stable release version. Functionality Added or Changed Percona Server 5.1.54-12.5 is based on MySQL 5.1.54. New Features Added: None Other Changes: Added system variable innodb_log_block_size and new value “keep_average” to system variable adaptive_checkpoint in Improved InnoDB I/O Scalability. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) Added new value [...]
Impact of the number of idle connections in MySQL
Be careful with my findings, I appear to have compile in debug mode, I am redoing the benchmarks. Updated version here. I recently had to work with many customers having large number of connections opened in MySQL and although I told them this was not optimal, I had no solid arguments to present. More than [...]
Great work Innodb Team
I thought I should praise Innodb team for all the work they have been doing recently. We see a lot of cool stuff happening, especially in the area of our interest which is Performance And Scalability. Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 had a lot of great performance improvements and 1.0.5/1.0.6 gets even further with long standing caching [...]
State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB
First time I heard about Galera on Percona Performance Conference 2009, Seppo Jaakola was presenting “Galera: Multi-Master Synchronous MySQL Replication Clusters”. It was impressed as I personally always wanted it for InnoDB, but we had it in plans at the bottom of the list, as this is very hard to implement properly. The idea by [...]
XtraDB: The Top 10 enhancements
Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop. Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1. Building this list was not really a scientific [...]
My “hot” list for next InnoDB features
Many InnoDB scalability problems seem fixed in InnoDB-plugin-1.0.3 and I expect InnoDB-plugin will run fine on 16-24 cores boxes for many workloads. And now it is time to look on systems with 32GB+ of RAM which are not rare nowadays. Working with real customer systems I have wish-list of features I would like to see [...]
When would you use SAN with MySQL ?
One question which comes up very often is when one should use SAN with MySQL, which is especially popular among people got used to Oracle or other Enterprise database systems which are quite commonly deployed on SAN. My question in such case is always what exactly are you trying to get by using SAN ?

