May 23, 2013

Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance

MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]

ext4 vs xfs on SSD

As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]

Introducing new type of benchmark

Traditionally the most benchmarks are focusing on throughput. We all get used to that, and in fact in our benchmarks, sysbench and tpcc-mysql, the final result is also represents the throughput (transactions per second in sysbench; NewOrder transactions Per Minute in tpcc-mysql). However, like Mark Callaghan mentioned in comments, response time is way more important [...]

Percona Server vs MySQL on Intel 320 SSD

If you are terrified by the stability of the results in MySQL in my previous post, I am going to show what we can get with Percona Server. This is also to address the results presented there Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4

Beware the Innodb Table Monitor

As I stated in my last post, I decided to use the Innodb Table monitor to diagnose an Index count mismatch error a customers found in their mysqld.err log to verify if the problem still existed. The Innodb Table Monitor has existed for basically forever in Innodb (the MySQL manual discusses it back in the 4.1 [...]

Innodb vs MySQL index counts

I had a customer recently who a few strange errors in their mysqld.err log:

This customer was running Percona Server 5.1 and they got this error on two tables during a maintenance window when they were adding indexes to the same tables.  We had a suspicion that it had something to do with Fast [...]

Benchmarking Galera replication overhead

When I mention Galera replication as in my previous post on this topic, the most popular question is how does it affect performance. Of course you may expect performance overhead, as in case with Galera replication we add some network roundtrip and certification process. How big is it ? In this post I am trying [...]

MySQL versions shootout

As part of work on “High Performance MySQL, 3rd edition”, Baron asked me to compare different MySQL version in some simple benchmark, but on decent hardware. So why not.

Testing the Group Commit Fix

As you may know, Kristian Nielsen made a fix for the Group Commit Problem which we many times wrote about. The fix came into MariaDB 5.3 and Mark Callaghan tested it recently . We ported this patch to Percona Server (it is not in the main branch yet), and here are the results of my [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]