One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
Percona Server vs MySQL on Intel 320 SSD
February 23, 2012 By 21 Comments
If you are terrified by the stability of the results in MySQL in my previous post, I am going to show what we can get with Percona Server. This is also to address the results presented there Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4
Announcing Percona Toolkit Release 2.0.3
February 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
We’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.3, with a couple of major improvements and many minor ones. You can download it, read the documentation, and get support for it. What’s new? You can read the changelog for the details, but here are the highlights: Brand new pt-diskstats, thanks to Brian Fraser. This tool is completely rewritten, and [...]
Benchmarking Galera replication overhead
October 13, 2011 By 12 Comments
When I mention Galera replication as in my previous post on this topic, the most popular question is how does it affect performance. Of course you may expect performance overhead, as in case with Galera replication we add some network roundtrip and certification process. How big is it ? In this post I am trying [...]
MySQL versions shootout
October 10, 2011 By 6 Comments
As part of work on “High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition”, Baron asked me to compare different MySQL version in some simple benchmark, but on decent hardware. So why not.
Testing the Group Commit Fix
July 13, 2011 By 13 Comments
As you may know, Kristian Nielsen made a fix for the Group Commit Problem which we many times wrote about. The fix came into MariaDB 5.3 and Mark Callaghan tested it recently . We ported this patch to Percona Server (it is not in the main branch yet), and here are the results of my [...]
Product to try: MySQL/MariaDB-Galera 0.8
June 13, 2011 By 34 Comments
I wrote about Galera about 1.5 years ago: State of the art: Galera – synchronous replication for InnoDB. It was about the 0.7 release, which was more like a proof-of-concept release (though Galera’s developers may not agree with that ) with some serious limitations (like using mysqldump for node propagation). The Galera team heard my [...]
Multiple purge threads in Percona Server 5.1.56 and MySQL 5.6.2
May 3, 2011 By 13 Comments
Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete. In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread. Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]
Intel Nehalem vs AMD Opteron shootout in sysbench workload
April 25, 2011 By 41 Comments
Having two big boxes in our lab, one based Intel Nehalem (Cisco UCS C250) and second on AMD Opteron (Dell PowerEdge R815), I decided to run some simple sysbench benchmark to compare how both CPUs perform and what kind of scalability we can expect.
How to use tcpdump on very busy hosts
April 18, 2011 By 17 Comments
Often I run into problems when trying to use mk-query-digest with tcpdump on “very” busy hosts. You might be thinking, “very busy is a relative and unquantifiable term,” and you’d be right, so I’ll phrase this differently. Let me give a little background to the problem first. Mk-query-digest tries to handle dropped or missing packets [...]
