Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
The performance effects of new patches
September 9, 2008 By 14 Comments
We are going to show the effects of the new patches applied to Percona HighPerf release. As you see from the following graphs, there is significant difference to normal version when the data bigger than buffer pool (right graph shows CPU usage)
How to load large files safely into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE
July 3, 2008 By 29 Comments
Recently I had a customer ask me about loading two huge files into InnoDB with LOAD DATA INFILE. The goal was to load this data on many servers without putting it into the binary log. While this is generally a fast way to load data (especially if you disable unique key checks and foreign key [...]
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 [...]
Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL Needs
March 5, 2008 By 23 Comments
I’m often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I’ve decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the [...]
Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II
November 4, 2007 By 13 Comments
I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?
June 26, 2007 By 2 Comments
I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see [...]
Countless storage engines
May 3, 2007 By 6 Comments
Today everybody writes about MySQL Conference & Expo and I am not an exclusion. I am under impression of count of storage engines were presented. In good old time when Oracle bought InnoDB, MySQL did one step – announced MySQL supports Plugginable Storage Architecture. In that time nobody was able to predict what is the [...]
