I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Is your MySQL Application having Busy IO by Oracle Measures ?
Preparing Choosing Storage Systems for MySQL talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I ran into great paper called Sane SAN 2010 by James Morle from Scale Abilities – and Oracle consulting company. It is worth to read for variety of reason yet for this post I wanted to mention what James calls “Busy” Oracle database [...]
MySQL performance on EC2/EBS versus RDS
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no longer think it’s a good idea to publish those blog posts [...]
InnoDB compression woes
InnoDB compression is getting some traction, and I see quite contradictory opinions. Someone has successful deployments in productions, and someone says that compression in current implementation is useless. To get some initial impression about performance I decided to run some sysbench with multi-tables benchmarks. I actually was preparing to do complex research, but even first [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
How Percona diagnoses MySQL server stalls
We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a [...]
Shard-Query adds parallelism to queries
Preamble: On performance, workload and scalability: MySQL has always been focused on OLTP workloads. In fact, both Percona Server and MySQL 5.5.7rc have numerous performance improvements which benefit workloads that have high concurrency. Typical OLTP workloads feature numerous clients (perhaps hundreds or thousands) each reading and writing small chunks of data. The recent improvements to [...]
Is your MySQL Server Loaded ?
So you’re running the benchmark/stress test – how do you tell if MySQL server is really loaded ? This looks like the trivial question but in fact, especially when workload consists of simple queries I see the load generation and network really putting a lot less load on MySQL than expected. For example you may [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 2
Part 1 of our series set-up our “test” application and looked at boosting performance of the application by buffer MySQL with memcached. Our test application is simple and requires only 3 basic operations per transaction 2 reads and 1 write. Using memcached combined with MySQL we ended up nearly getting a 10X performance boost from [...]

