The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
Percona Server scalability on multi-cores server
We now have hardware in our test lab that represents the next generation of commodity servers for databases. It’s a Cisco UCS C250 server, powered by two Intel Westmere CPUs (X5670 @ 2.93GHz). Each CPU has 6 cores and 12 threads. The most amazing part is the amount of memory. It has 384GB of RAM, which is [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
PBXT in tpcc-like benchmark
Finally I was able to run PBXT 1.0.11 pre-GA in tpcc-like workload, apparently there was bug with did not allow me to get the result earlier, and I am happy to see that PBXT team managed it. For initial runs I took tpcc 100 warehouses ( about 10GB of data) which fully fits into memory [...]
InnoDB, InnoDB-plugin vs XtraDB on fast storage
To continue fun with FusionIO cards, I wanted to check how MySQL / InnoDB performs here. For benchmark I took MySQL 5.1.42 with built-in InnoDB, InnoDB-plugin 1.0.6, and XtraDB 1.0.6-9 ( InnoDB with Percona patches). As benchmark engine I used tpcc-mysql with 1000 warehouses ( which gives around 90GB of data + indexes) on my [...]
How many partitions can you have ?
I had an interesting case recently. The customer dealing with large MySQL data warehouse had the table which was had data merged into it with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE statements. The performance was extremely slow. I turned out it is caused by hundreds of daily partitions created for this table. What is the most [...]
table_cache negative scalability
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
Air traffic queries in LucidDB
After my first post Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB where I was not able to finish task with LucidDB, John Sichi contacted me with help to setup. You can see instruction how to load data on LucidDB Wiki page You can find the description of benchmark in original post, there I will [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3
This is part 3 of our series. In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database. The [...]
Tuning for heavy writing workloads
For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]

