Ignacio Nin and I (mostly Ignacio) have worked together to create tcprstat[1], a new tool that times TCP requests and prints out statistics on them. The output looks somewhat like vmstat or iostat, but we’ve chosen the statistics carefully so you can compute meaningful things about your TCP traffic. What is this good for? In [...]
Percona Server 5.1.47-rel11.0
Dear Community, Percona Server version 5.1.47-rel11.0 is available for download now. The changes in this release include: New features Percona Server is now based on MySQL 5.1.47, and XtraDB is now based on InnoDB plugin 1.0.8. XtraDB now uses the fast recovery code released in InnoDB Plugin version 1.0.8, instead of Percona’s earlier fast-recovery code. [...]
Is your server’s performance about to degrade?
I’ve been talking and writing a bit lately about the scaling problems I’m seeing on fast servers running lots of queries. As a rough guide, I’m seeing this in servers running 20k queries per second and higher, lots of memory, lots of CPU cores, and most queries are running faster than one millisecond; some in [...]
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, [...]
FusionIO – time for benchmarks
I posted about FusionIO couple times RAID vs SSD vs FusionIO and Testing FusionIO: strict_sync is too strict…. The problem was that FusionIO did not provide durability or results were too bad in strict mode, so I lost interest FusionIO for couple month. But I should express respect to FusionIO team, they did not ignore [...]
How (not) to find unused indexes
I’ve seen a few people link to an INFORMATION_SCHEMA query to be able to find any indexes that have low cardinality, in an effort to find out what indexes should be removed. This method is flawed – here’s the first reason why:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 | CREATE TABLE `sales` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `customer_id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL, `status` enum('archived','active') DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `status` (`status`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=65691 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; mysql> SELECT count(*), status FROM sales GROUP by status; +----------+---------+ | count(*) | status | +----------+---------+ |   65536 | archived | |     154 | active | +----------+---------+ 2 rows in set (0.17 sec) mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM sales WHERE status='active'; # query 1 +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+--------+---------+-------+------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key   | key_len | ref  | rows | Extra      | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+--------+---------+-------+------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE     | sales | ref | status       | status | 2      | const | 196 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+--------+---------+-------+------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.06 sec) mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM sales WHERE status='archived'; # query 2 +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra      | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE     | sales | ALL | status       | NULL | NULL   | NULL | 65690 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec) |
The cardinality of status index is woeful, but provided that the application [...]
Quick comparison of MyISAM, Infobright, and MonetDB
Recently I was doing a little work for a client who has MyISAM tables with many columns (the same one Peter wrote about recently). The client’s performance is suffering in part because of the number of columns, which is over 200. The queries are generally pretty simple (sums of columns), but they’re ad-hoc (can access [...]
How Percona Develops Open-Source Software
Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community. We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are [...]
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 [...]
New patches, new builds
We made new patches, improved previous and want to announce new builds for 5.0.62, 5.0.67 and 5.1.26 versions. One of biggest changes we separated releases of 5.0 into two branches. First, just “-percona” release is more stable and contains only stable and proven on many installation patches. Second is “-percona-highperf” release, which contains experimental patches [...]

