Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?
Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]
More on table_cache
In my previous post I looked into how large table_cache actually can decrease performance. The “miss” path is getting more expensive very quickly as table cache growths so if you’re going to have high miss ratio anyway you’re better off with small table cache. What I have not checked though is how does table_cache (or [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
My “hot” list for next InnoDB features
Many InnoDB scalability problems seem fixed in InnoDB-plugin-1.0.3 and I expect InnoDB-plugin will run fine on 16-24 cores boxes for many workloads. And now it is time to look on systems with 32GB+ of RAM which are not rare nowadays. Working with real customer systems I have wish-list of features I would like to see [...]
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 [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]
Figuring out what limits MySQL Replication
Today I was cloning the master using LVM Snapshot and found it was taking quite a while to catch up, which highlighted replication could be the limiting factor for this system quite soon, so I decided to check what is limiting MySQL Replication speed. My first idea was to check it based on slow query [...]
Opening Tables scalability
I was restarting MySQL on box with 50.000 of Innodb tables and again it took couple of hours to reach decent performance because of “Opening Tables” stage was taking long. Part of the problem is Innodb is updating stats on each table open which is possibly expensive operation, but really it is only great test [...]

