Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]
DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL
Benchmarking single-row insert performance on Amazon EC2
I have been working for a customer benchmarking insert performance on Amazon EC2, and I have some interesting results that I wanted to share. I used a nice and effective tool iiBench which has been developed by Tokutek. Though the “1 billion row insert challenge” for which this tool was originally built is long over, [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
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 [...]
Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB
I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.
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 [...]
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing
We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
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 [...]

