Recently I wrote about InnoDB scalability on 24-core box, and we made research of scalability problems in sysbench write workload (benchmark emulates intensive insert/delete queries). By our results the problem is in concurrency on rollback segment, which by default is single and all transactions are serialized accessing to segment. Fortunately InnoDB internally has mechanism to [...]
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers
So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
MySQL Performance on Memory Appliance
Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on “Memory Appliance” by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system. I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
MySQL: what read_buffer_size value is optimal ?
The more I work with MySQL Performance Optimization and Optimization for other applications the better I understand I have to less believe in common sense or common sense of documentation writers and do more benchmarks and performance research. I just recently wrote about rather surprising results with sort performance and today I’ve discovered even read_buffer_size [...]
MySQL and PostgreSQL SpecJAppServer benchmark results
Listening to Josh Berkus presentation on OSCON today I decided to take a closer look at SpecJAppServer benchmarks results which were published by PostgreSQL recently and which as Josh Puts it “This publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL, but almost as fast as Oracle (since [...]
Top 5 Wishes for MySQL
About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]
MySQL Users Conference – Innodb
It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]

