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
November 10, 2011 By 14 Comments
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 [...]
What’s required to tune MySQL?
July 27, 2011 By 4 Comments
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
June 9, 2011 By 13 Comments
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Multiple purge threads in Percona Server 5.1.56 and MySQL 5.6.2
May 3, 2011 By 13 Comments
Part of the InnoDB duties, being an MVCC-implementing storage engine, is to get rid of–purge–the old versions of the records as they become obsolete. In MySQL 5.1 this is done by the master InnoDB thread. Since then, InnoDB has been moving towards the parallelized purge: in MySQL 5.5 there is an option to have a [...]
Using Flexviews – part two, change data capture
March 25, 2011 By 26 Comments
In my previous post I introduced materialized view concepts. This post begins with an introduction to change data capture technology and describes some of the ways in which it can be leveraged for your benefit. This is followed by a description of FlexCDC, the change data capture tool included with Flexviews. It continues with an [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
January 13, 2011 By 9 Comments
In my recent benchmarks, such as this one about the Virident TachIon card, I used different values for innodb_buffer_pool_size, like 13GB, 52GB, and 144GB, for testing the tpcc-mysql database with size 100G. This was needed in order to test different memory/dataset size ratios. But why is it important, and how does it affect how InnoDB works [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
January 3, 2011 By 11 Comments
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 [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)
December 21, 2010 By 11 Comments
This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab:Â a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]
Impact of the number of idle connections in MySQL
December 17, 2010 By 21 Comments
Be careful with my findings, I appear to have compile in debug mode, I am redoing the benchmarks. Updated version here. I recently had to work with many customers having large number of connections opened in MySQL and although I told them this was not optimal, I had no solid arguments to present. More than [...]
