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 [...]
The two even more fundamental performance metrics
In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency. I derived all of these metrics from two “even more [...]
Caching could be the last thing you want to do
I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching. Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?
There are interesting posts these day about future of MySQL Replication by Brian Frank and Arjen. I think it very interesting to take a look at a bit bigger picture using framework from Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. I’m not going to speak about disruption and commoditisation of Database Market, leaving this for Market talks, [...]
How fast can MySQL Process Data
Reading Barons post about Kickfire Appliance and of course talking to them directly I learned a lot in their product is about beating data processing limitations of current systems. This raises valid question how fast can MySQL process (filter) data using it current architecture ? I decided to test the most simple case – what [...]
Top 5 Wishes for MySQL
About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]
MySQL Query Cache and prepared statements – support comming ?
Looking at post by Konstantin Osipov we should finally get Query Cache working with prepared statements in MySQL 5.1 The interesting thing Konstantin notes it just took few days to fix it – I believe MySQL Support Team alone spent much more times explaining customers why is it not done or troubleshooting cases with wrong [...]
Database access Optimization in Web Applications.
This is pretty simple approach I often use called to optimize web application performance if problem happens with few pages. If we have “everything is slow” problem looking at slow query logs may be better start. So what could you do ? Look at the information shown on the page which comes from database. This [...]

