Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Economics of Performance Optimization
March 13, 2008 By 9 Comments
I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
November 3, 2007 By 39 Comments
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
Sphinx: Going Beyond full text search
July 23, 2007 By 18 Comments
I’ve already wrote a few times about various projects using Sphinx with MySQL for scalable Full Text Search applications. For example on BoardReader we’re using this combination to build search against over 1 billion of forum posts totaling over 1.5TB of data handling hundreds of thousands of search queries per day. The count of forum [...]
Implementing efficient counters with MySQL
July 1, 2007 By 16 Comments
On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object – blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view. The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way – they [...]
Content delivery system design mistakes
February 11, 2007 By 9 Comments
This week I helped dealing with performance problems (part MySQL related and part related to LAMP in general) of system which does quite a bit of content delivery, serving file downloads and images – something a lot of web sites need to do these days. There were quite a bit of mistakes in design for [...]
Thoughts on MySQL Replication
July 7, 2006 By 18 Comments
Brian Aker recently published good write up about using MySQL replication. The piece I find missing however is good description of warning about limits of this approach as well as things you need to watch out for. You can call me person with negative mind but I tend to think about limits as well. So [...]
Innodb Fuzzy checkpointing woes
May 10, 2006 By Leave a Comment
As you might know Innodb storage engines uses Fuzzy Checkpointing technique as part of it recovery strategy. It is very nice approach which means database never needs to “stall” to perform total modified pages flush but instead flushing of dirty pages happens gradually in small chunks so database load is very even. This works great [...]
