Our latest MySQL white paper is Improving Percona Server performance with Flashcache on the Virident tachIOn Drive. (Virident funded the research, but as always, we wrote the report ourselves.) The conclusion is that Flashcache can be good for read-heavy workloads, but more research is needed to understand its performance characteristics on write-heavy workloads. We explain [...]
Finding an optimal balance of I/O, CPU, and RAM for MySQL
For a long time I’ve wanted to know how MySQL scales as you add more memory to the server. Vadim recently benchmarked the effects of increasing memory and CPU core count. He looked for a balance between utilizing the hardware as much as possible, limiting the system complexity, and lowering the price-to-performance ratio. The outcome [...]
Want a discount to Percona Live?
We’ve given discount coupon codes to all of our Percona Live sponsors, so watch the Twitter tag #perconalive to find discount announcements. Here’s the list of sponsoring organizations: Clustrix Vork Continuent Fusion-io Infobright Pentaho Schooner Information Technology SkySQL Virident Webyog Akiban Couchbase EffectiveMySQL Facebook New Relic OmniTI Sphinx Tokutek We Build Pages Zmanda DaniWeb New [...]
How Percona strives to remain neutral and independent
Many of the prominent companies in the MySQL ecosystem are Percona customers, including hardware manufacturers, software developers, hosted service providers, and appliance developers. We perform paid and unpaid research on their products, and we publish blog posts related to their products or services. Independence and objectivity are core Percona values. How do we balance the [...]
Percona Server Scales Vertically with Virident tachIOn Drives
We’ve published a new white paper that explains how to stop sharding and start scaling vertically with PCI-E flash drives, specifically the Virident tachIOn drive, which offers consistent, low-latency IO performance. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, so it’s a great feeling to have an explicitly recommended reference architecture: buy flash storage first, [...]
Percona Server 5.5.8 Beta Release
It’s finally here! Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.8-20.0 is now available for download. This is a beta release of Percona’s enhancements to the MySQL 5.5.8 server. Here are some highlights: Performance and scalability improvements throughout the server and storage engine Optimizations for flash storage such as SSD, Virident, and FusionIO Optimizations for cloud computing The [...]
Percona Live is on Wednesday – thank you to all our sponsors
Percona Live is in only two days away – and we’ve managed to completely sell out (something I predicted earlier). Before I go into details, I want to thank three sponsors who have been absolutely awesome: Clustrix is providing an open bar all evening, New Relic is providing all attendees with lunch and Fusion-io is [...]
White Paper: “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently” from Percona and Virident
Percona was working closely with Virident on evaluating tachIOn as solution for MySQL, and as result you can find whitepaper “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently Using Virident tachIOn Drives”, available from Virident website. It was done as part of our consulting practice, but all results and numbers are certified by Percona. I personally really enjoyed performance [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
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 [...]
How long is recovery from 8G innodb_log_file
In my previous posts I highlighted that one of improvements in Percona Server is support of innodb_log_file_size > 4G. This test was done using Percona Server 5.5.7, but the same performance expected for InnoDB-plugin and MySQL 5.5.

