Recently I had an interesting surprise with concurrent inserts into a MyISAM table. The inserts were not happening concurrently with SELECT statements; they were blocking and the process list was filling up with queries in Locked status. My first thought was that the customer had deleted from the table, which leaves “holes” in the middle [...]
The MySQL optimizer, the OS cache, and sequential versus random I/O
April 28, 2008 By 17 Comments
In my post on estimating query completion time, I wrote about how I measured the performance on a join between a few tables in a typical star schema data warehousing scenario. In short, a query that could take several days to run with one join order takes an hour with another, and the optimizer chose [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
November 3, 2007 By 39 Comments
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
October 12, 2007 By 10 Comments
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 [...]
How much overhead is caused by on disk temporary tables
August 16, 2007 By 26 Comments
As you might know while running GROUP BY and some other kinds of queries MySQL needs to create temporary tables, which can be created in memory, using MEMORY storage engine or can be created on disk as MYISAM tables. Which one will be used depends on the allowed tmp_table_size and also by the data which [...]
MySQL Slow query log in the table
May 31, 2007 By 1 Comment
As of MySQL 5.1 get MySQL slow query log logged in mysql.slow_log table instead of the file as you had in previous versions. We rarely would use this feature as it is incompatible with our slow query analyses patch and tools Fixing this is not trivial while staying 100% compatible to standard format as TIME [...]
Merge Tables Gotcha
May 9, 2007 By 4 Comments
I had the interesting customer case today which made me to do a bit research on the problem. You can create merge table over MyISAM tables which contain primary key and global uniqueness would not be enforced in this case, this is as far as most people will think about it. In fact however it [...]
PBXT benchmarks
April 8, 2007 By 14 Comments
The PBXT Storage Engine (http://www.primebase.com/xt/) is getting stable and we decided to benchmark it in different workloads. This time I tested only READ queries, similar to ones in benchmark InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1) The difference is I used new sysbench with Lua scripting language, so all queries were scripted for sysbench.
Performance impact of complex queries
January 17, 2007 By 11 Comments
What is often underestimated is impact of MySQL Performance by complex queries on large data sets(ie some large aggregate queries) and batch jobs. It is not rare to see queries which were taking milliseconds to stall for few seconds, especially in certain OS configurations, and on low profile servers (ie having only one disk drive) [...]
InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1
January 8, 2007 By 117 Comments
Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
