May 19, 2013

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

MySQL 5.6: Improvements in the Nutshell

Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not [...]

Write contentions on the query cache

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

MySQL caching methods and tips

“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]

Percona Server with XtraDB Case Study, Behind the Scenes

We’ve published our first case study. The customer, ideeli, had a database that was struggling on standard MySQL and InnoDB. The big win was the upgrade to XtraDB. The business continued to grow quickly, and months later under much more traffic, the database is still outperforming their previous version. I thought I’d write a few [...]

Analyzing the distribution of InnoDB log file writes

I recently did a quick analysis of the distribution of writes to InnoDB’s log files. On a high-traffic commodity MySQL server running Percona XtraDB for a gaming workload (mostly inserts to the “moves” table), I used strace to gather statistics about how the log file writes are distributed in terms of write size. InnoDB writes [...]

Scaling: Consider both Size and Load

So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why, I’ll name most important of them: [...]

Is your server’s performance about to degrade?

I’ve been talking and writing a bit lately about the scaling problems I’m seeing on fast servers running lots of queries. As a rough guide, I’m seeing this in servers running 20k queries per second and higher, lots of memory, lots of CPU cores, and most queries are running faster than one millisecond; some in [...]