May 19, 2013

EC2/EBS single and RAID volumes IO benchmark

During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID [...]

Beware: ext3 and sync-binlog do not play well together

One of our customers reported strange problem with MySQL having extremely poor performance when sync-binlog=1 is enabled, even though the system with RAID and BBU were expected to have much better performance. The problem could be repeated with SysBench as follows:

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

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 [...]

The tool I’ve been waiting for years

I’ve just been pointed to the nice tool which I was waiting for years to see. It is fincore – little perl script which allows you to see what pages of file are cached in OS memory. This is really cool.

Be careful rotating MySQL logs

If you enable logging of all queries as “slow queries” using the patch or MySQL 5.1 you can get log file to grow huge. Same may happen with general log file. In some cases we’ve got log file sizes of 100G or more which may need to be cleaned up. Here is some danger waiting [...]

Using LVM for MySQL Backup and Replication Setup

If someone asks me about MySQL Backup advice my first question would be if they have LVM installed or have some systems with similar features set for other operation systems. Veritas File System can do it for Solaris. Most SAN systems would work as well. What is really needed is ability to create atomic snapshot [...]