Now that InnoDB is the default storage engine in MySQL, is it time to update the default configuration for the InnoDB log file size (innodb_log_file_size) setting? In general, there are two settings that simply can’t be left at their historical defaults for a production installation. MySQL 5.5 increased the default buffer pool size to something [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
What’s a good buffer pool read/write ratio?
At Percona Live last week, someone showed me a graph from their Cacti monitoring system, using the templates that I wrote. It was the buffer pool pages read, written, and created. He asked me if the graph was okay. Shouldn’t there be a lot more pages read than written, he asked? It’s a great question. [...]
Innodb Caching (part 2)
Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
Effect from innodb log block size 4096 bytes
In my post MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive I mentioned that I used innodb-log-block-size=4096 in Percona Server to get better throughput, but later Dimitri in his article MySQL Performance: Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5 sounded doubt that it really makes sense. Here us quote from his article: “Question: what is a [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]
Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4
Percona Server version 5.1.53-12.4 is now available for download. It is now the current stable release version. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4 is based on MySQL 5.1.53.  New Features Added: Precompiled UDFs for Maatkit (FNV and MurmurHash hash functions to provide faster checksums) are now included in distributions. Fixes feature request #689992. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky) [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]

