May 21, 2013

Virident FlashMAX MLC in tpcc-mysql workload

As I mentioned in previous post on Virident FlashMAX MLC, beside sysbench benchmark, I also run tpcc-mysql (to compare performance Virident FlashMAX vs Fusion-io ioDrive Duo) The report with results is there: http://www.percona.com/files/white-papers/virident-mlc-tpcc.pdf

Review of Virident FlashMAX MLC cards

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 [...]

Clustrix benchmarks under tpcc-mysql workload

I’ve been working with Clustrix team for long time on the evaluation of Clustrix product, and this is the report on performance characteristics of Clustrix under tpcc-mysql workload. I tested tpcc 5000W (~500GB of data in InnoDB) on Clustrix systems with 3, 6, 9-nodes and also, to have base for comparison, ran the same workload [...]

Multiple MySQL instances on Fusion-io ioDrive

It is known that MySQL due internal limitations is not able to utilize all CPU and IO resources available on modern hardware. Idea is to run multiple instances of MySQL to gain better performance on Fusion-io ioDrive card. Full report is available in PDF

White Paper: Flashcache and MySQL on Virident drive

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 [...]

Followup on performance metrics: slides, video

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof. I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

What Causes Downtime in MySQL?

We’ve just published a new white paper analyzing the causes of emergency incidents filed by our customers. The numbers contradict the urban myth that bad SQL is the most common problem in databases. There are a number of surprises in other areas, too, such as the causes of data loss. This is the companion to [...]