May 24, 2013

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 [...]

FusionIO 320GB MLC benchmarks

After my previous benchmarks of FusionIO 160GB SLC card, FusionIO team sent me for the tests another card, FusionIO 320GB MLC. I should say I really appreciate an opportunity to play with this card and with combination of two cards. This card is also not cheap, the price I can find on dell.com is $6,829.99, [...]

Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?

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 [...]

Innodb Double Write

One of very interesting techniques Innodb uses is technique called “doublewrite” It means Innodb will write data twice when it performs table space writes – writes to log files are done only once. So why doublewrite is needed ? It is needed to archive data safety in case of partial page writes. Innodb does not [...]

SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through

Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

How much memory Innodb locks really take ?

After playing yesterday a bit with INSERT … SELECT I decided to check is Innodb locks are relly as efficient in terms of low resource usage as they are advertised. Lets start with a bit of background – in Innodb row level locks are implemented by having special lock table, located in the buffer pool [...]

MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.

MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]