Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
July 5, 2012 By 11 Comments
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
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 [...]
Finding an optimal balance of I/O, CPU, and RAM for MySQL
May 16, 2011 By 4 Comments
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 [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
March 8, 2011 By 1 Comment
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
Cache Miss Storm
September 10, 2010 By 30 Comments
I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything [...]
InnoDB, InnoDB-plugin vs XtraDB on fast storage
January 13, 2010 By 13 Comments
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 [...]
XtraDB benchmarks – 1.5X gain in IO-bound load
December 18, 2008 By 30 Comments
I guess it is first reaction on new storage engine – show me benefits. So there is benchmark I made on one our servers. It is Dell 2950 with 8CPU cores and RAID10 on 6 disks with BBU, and 32GB RAM on board with CentOS 5.2 as OS. This is quite typical server we recommend [...]
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
August 7, 2008 By 6 Comments
One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]
