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, [...]
kernel_mutex problem. Or double throughput with single variable
December 2, 2011 By 17 Comments
Problem with kernel_mutex in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.5 is known: Bug report. In fact in MySQL 5.6 there are some fixes that suppose to provide a solution, but MySQL 5.6 yet has long way ahead before production, and it is also not clear if the problem is really fixed. Meantime the problem with kernel_mutex [...]
Three ways that the poor man’s profiler can hurt MySQL
December 2, 2011 By 19 Comments
Over the last few years, Domas’s technique of using GDB as a profiler has become a key tool in helping us analyze MySQL when customers are having trouble. We have our own implementation of it in Percona Toolkit (pt-pmp) and we gather GDB backtraces from pt-stalk and pt-collect. Although it’s helped us figure out a [...]
Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket
August 26, 2011 By 4 Comments
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 performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
August 4, 2011 By 11 Comments
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
How Innodb Contention may manifest itself
July 28, 2011 By 1 Comment
Even though multiple fixes have been implemented in Percona Server and MySQL 5.5, there are still workloads in which case mutex (or rw-lock) contention is a performance limiting factor, helped by ever growing number of cores available in the systems. It is interesting though the contention may manifest itself in the different form from the [...]
InnoDB compression woes
May 20, 2011 By 14 Comments
InnoDB compression is getting some traction, and I see quite contradictory opinions. Someone has successful deployments in productions, and someone says that compression in current implementation is useless. To get some initial impression about performance I decided to run some sysbench with multi-tables benchmarks. I actually was preparing to do complex research, but even first [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
“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 [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 2: The Binary Log
October 23, 2010 By 11 Comments
This is the second in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in certain circumstances (links: part 1). In the first part, I wrote about single-threaded replication. Upstream from the replicas is the primary, which enables replication by writing a so-called “binary log” of events that modify data in the server. The binary log is [...]
Percona Server with XtraDB Case Study, Behind the Scenes
October 21, 2010 By 13 Comments
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 [...]
