May 20, 2013

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? [...]

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

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:

MySQL, AIX5L and malloc()

Some time ago I get brand new IBM POWER6 server as the replacement for “old” P5 used to host Oracle database. Because we planed to use advanced virtualization with VIOS + LPAR/DLPAR I conceived the idea to use one spare partition for MySQL tests. Because I had no past experience with it and there is [...]

MySQL File System Fragmentation Benchmarks

Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found:

10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL

People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]

SysBench – benchmark tool

Sysbench is benchmark developed by Alexey Kopytov (software engineer @ MySQL AB) – http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/ and I want to write a short intro about this tool as sysbench is one of software for my everyday use. For example, SUN published their Solaris vs RedHat stuff based on sysbench’s results (Peter and me provided performance consutling for [...]

Are larger buffers always better ?

Sometimes I see people thinking about buffers as “larger is always better” so if “large” MySQL sample configuration is designed for 2GB and they happen to have 16, they would simply multiply all/most values by 10 and hope it will work well. Obviously it does not. The least problem would be wasting memory, allocating a [...]