May 23, 2013

Identifying the load with the help of pt-query-digest and Percona Server

Overview Profiling, analyzing and then fixing queries is likely the most oft-repeated part of a job of a DBA and one that keeps evolving, as new features are added to the application new queries pop up that need to be analyzed and fixed. And there are not too many tools out there that can make [...]

Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition

There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options.  I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases.  This is not meant to cover every [...]

Using MySQL as a Queue, and Free Percona Live Tickets

This week’s TGIF give-away contest is a day early, and it’s a guest post over on the Engine Yard blog: 5 subtle ways you’re using MySQL as a queue, and why it’ll bite you. Go there to read the full post, and watch @engineyard’s Twitter feed for the chance to enter the contest for free [...]

Followup on performance metrics: slides, video

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof. I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and [...]

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 [...]

Using any general purpose computer as a special purpose SIMD computer

Often times, from a computing perspective, one must run a function on a large amount of input. Often times, the same function must be run on many pieces of input, and this is a very expensive process unless the work can be done in parallel. Shard-Query introduces set based processing, which on the surface appears [...]

Distributed set processing performance analysis with ICE 3.5.2pl1 at 20 nodes.

Demonstrating distributed set processing performance Shard-Query + ICE scales very well up to at least 20 nodes This post is a detailed performance analysis of what I’ve coined “distributed set processing”. Please also read this post’s “sister post” which describes the distributed set processing technique. Also, remember that Percona can help you get up and [...]

Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query

Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]

The two even more fundamental performance metrics

In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency. I derived all of these metrics from two “even more [...]

Percona Live gets bigger: two more speaker tracks!

We’ve just rented more rooms, and published an additional two tracks of speakers for Percona Live in New York on May 26th. The schedule is here. There is a long queue of speaker submissions we’re finalizing and will be adding to the schedule, to fill the few empty slots in those new rooms. My favorite [...]