May 19, 2013

Adaptive flushing in MySQL 5.6

As you may know, flushing in MySQL is an area of my interest, I wrote about it several times, i.e. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/09/18/disaster-mysql-5-5-flushing/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/03/31/innodb-flushing-a-lot-of-memory-and-slow-disk/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/01/03/mysql-5-5-8-in-search-of-stability/ In MySQL 5.6 there was implemented a new flushing logic, so I decided to check what do we have now.

DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL

Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]

A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins

MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2

I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]

Fishing with dynamite, brought to you by the randgen and dbqp

I tend to speak highly of the random query generator as a testing tool and thought I would share a story that shows how it can really shine. At our recent dev team meeting, we spent approximately 30 minutes of hack time to produce test cases for 3 rather hard to duplicate bugs. Of course, [...]

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 [...]

Connecting orphaned .ibd files

There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]

Multiple purge threads in Percona Server 5.1.56 and MySQL 5.6.2

Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete.  In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread.  Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]

Performance problem with Innodb and DROP TABLE

I’ve been working with an application which does a lot of CREATE and DROP table for Innodb tables and we’ve discovered DROP TABLE can take a lot of time and when it happens a lot of other threads stall in “Opening Tables” State. Also contrary to my initial suspect benchmarking create/drop table was CPU bound [...]