May 23, 2013

Testing Virident FlashMAX 1400

I still continue to run benchmarks of different SSD cards. This time I show numbers for Virident FlashMAX 1400. This is a MLC PCIe SSD device. There are couple notes on these results. First, this time I use a different server. For this benchmark it is Cisco UCS C250, while for previous results I used [...]

Testing Samsung SSD SATA 256GB 830 – not all SSD created equal

I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, [...]

Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB

I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.

Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?

A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]

Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition

There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options.  I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases.  This is not meant to cover every [...]

Which Linux distribution for a MySQL database server? A specific point of view.

One of the more common questions I get asked is which Linux distribution I would use for a MySQL database server. Bearing the responsibility for someone else’s success means I should advise something that is stable, reliable, easy to manage and has plenty of resources available online. It should also allow running MySQL without too [...]

Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance

When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]

Review of Virident FlashMAX MLC cards

I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND. I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so. At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC [...]

Multiple MySQL instances on Fusion-io ioDrive

It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware. Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card. Full report is available in PDF

Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]