May 20, 2013

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]

MySQL and Percona Server in LinkBench benchmark

Around month ago Facebook has announced the Linkbench benchmark that models the social graph OLTP workload. Sources, along with a very nice description of how to setup and run this benchmark, can be found here. We decided to run this benchmark for MySQL Server 5.5.30, 5.6.11 and Percona Server 5.5.30 and check how these servers [...]

Webinar: Best Practices for MySQL Scalability on May 1

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to register for my “Best Practices for MySQL Scalability” Webinar which will take place on May 1st at 10 a.m. PST. This will be an overview presentation, led by me and providing a high-level look at the components of MySQL scalability: application architecture, MySQL version [...]

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer

A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]

MySQL performance: Impact of memory allocators (Part 2)

Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario? [...]

Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster

I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a [...]

Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server for Under $80

There are many reasons for wanting a small MySQL database server: You’re a uni student who wants to learn the SQL language better and needs a mini-testbox You’re a Windows user who wants to play around with Percona Server on Linux You’re a corporate application developer who wants a small SQL development & test box [...]

How to start a Percona XtraDB Cluster

Before version 5.5.28 of Percona XtraDB Cluster, the easiest way was to join the cluster using wsrep_urls in [mysqld_safe] section of my.cnf. So with a cluster of 3 nodes like this : node1 = 192.168.1.1 node2 = 192.168.1.2 node3 = 192.168.1.3 we defined the setting like this :

With that line above in my.cnf [...]

Webinar: Avoiding common traps when designing a MySQL application

On January 16th at 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern, I will give a webinar about the main traps that are awaiting you when designing and building a stable and high-performance MySQL application. I will discuss a broad range of topics, from hardware and backups to instrumentation and indexing. I often see during my consulting practice [...]