Not so far ago Fusion-io announced SDK which provides direct API access to Fusion ioMemory(tm) in addition to providing a native filesystem (directFS) with a goal to avoid overhead from kernel and regular Linux filesystems: ext4 and xfs. Fusion-io will explain these features during our Percona Live New York conference and share performance numbers. It [...]
Distro Packages, Pre-built Binaries or Compile Your Own MySQL
September 4, 2012 By 7 Comments
I’ve been helping customers deploy and maintain MySQL (and variants) for the last couple of years and it has always been interesting to hear customer thoughts on how they want their servers installed. It has also been asked many times not only by our support and consulting customers, but widely from different forums and blogs [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
July 5, 2012 By 11 Comments
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
thread_concurrency doesn’t do what you expect
June 4, 2012 By 3 Comments
Over the last months I’ve seen lots of customers trying to tune the thread concurrency inside MySQL with the variable thread_concurrency. Our advice is: stop wasting your time, it does nothing on GNU/Linux Some of the biggest GNU/Linux distributions includes the variable thread_concurrency in their my.cnf file by default. One example is Debian and its [...]
btrfs – probably not ready yet
May 22, 2012 By 17 Comments
Every time I have a conversation on SSD, someone mentions btrfs filesystem. And usually it is colored as a solution that will solve all our problems, improve overall performance and SSD in particular, and it is a saviour. Of course it caught my curiosity and I decided to perform a benchmark similar to what I [...]
Percona welcomes Drizzle 7.1
April 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The Drizzle team has published the first Drizzle 7.1 stable release. The announcement on the Drizzle blog covers some of the major improvements in this release over the previous stable release, Drizzle 7.0. I plan to write a variety of blog posts on each of the new features over the coming weeks. Major features include: Multi [...]
linux.conf.au 2012 roundup
January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I spent last week at linux.conf.au in Ballarat, Victoria (that’s the Victoria in Australia, not wherever else there may be one) which is only a pleasant two hour drive from my home town of Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). I sent an email internally to our experts detailing bits of the conference that may interest them [...]
Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition
December 16, 2011 By 9 Comments
There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.
December 8, 2011 By 38 Comments
One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]
kernel_mutex problem cont. Or triple your throughput
December 2, 2011 By 10 Comments
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 [...]
