May 21, 2013

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

How does MySQL Replication really work?

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Earlier this week, Cédric blogged about how easy we can get confused between a covering index and a full index scan in the EXPLAIN output. While a covering index (seen with EXPLAIN as Extra: Using index) is a very interesting performance optimization, a full index scan (type: index) is according to the documentation the 2nd [...]

The Math of Automated Failover

There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]

Intel SSD 910 vs HDD RAID in tpcc-mysql benchmark

I continue my benchmarks of Intel SSD 910, previous time I compared it with Fusion-io ioDrive http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/09/07/intel-ssd-910-in-tpcc-mysql-benchmark/. Now I want to test this card against RAID over spinning disks.

Write contentions on the query cache

While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]

Adaptive flushing in MySQL 5.6

As you may know, flushing in MySQL is an area of my interest, I wrote about it several times, i.e. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/09/18/disaster-mysql-5-5-flushing/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/03/31/innodb-flushing-a-lot-of-memory-and-slow-disk/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/01/03/mysql-5-5-8-in-search-of-stability/ In MySQL 5.6 there was implemented a new flushing logic, so I decided to check what do we have now.

Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do [...]

Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

Recovery after DROP & CREATE

In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because  mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:

If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]