This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 1
(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set [...]
MySQL 5.6.7-RC in tpcc-mysql benchmark
MySQL 5.6.7 RC is there, so I decided to test how it performs in tpcc-mysql workload from both performance and stability standpoints. I can’t say that my experience was totally flawless, I bumped into two bugs: MySQL 5.6.7 locks itself on CREATE INDEX MySQL 5.6.7-rc crashed under tpcc-mysql workload But at the end, is not [...]
The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages
This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]
Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?
A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Finding an optimal balance of I/O, CPU, and RAM for MySQL
For a long time I’ve wanted to know how MySQL scales as you add more memory to the server. Vadim recently benchmarked the effects of increasing memory and CPU core count. He looked for a balance between utilizing the hardware as much as possible, limiting the system complexity, and lowering the price-to-performance ratio. The outcome [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
In my recent benchmarks, such as this one about the Virident TachIon card, I used different values for innodb_buffer_pool_size, like 13GB, 52GB, and 144GB, for testing the tpcc-mysql database with size 100G. This was needed in order to test different memory/dataset size ratios. But why is it important, and how does it affect how InnoDB works [...]

