Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not – it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
November 22, 2010 By 2 Comments
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
Tuning InnoDB Concurrency Tickets
May 24, 2010 By 5 Comments
InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]
The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines
May 8, 2010 By 22 Comments
One of the big “Selling Points” of MySQL is support for Multiple Storage engines, and from the glance view it is indeed great to provide users with same top level SQL interface allowing them to store their data many different way. As nice as it sounds the in theory this benefit comes at very significant [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
table_cache negative scalability
November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
Tuning for heavy writing workloads
October 14, 2009 By 9 Comments
For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]
Which adaptive should we use?
September 15, 2009 By 14 Comments
As you may know, InnoDB has 2 limits for unflushed modified blocks in the buffer pool. The one is from physical size of the buffer pool. And the another one is oldness of the block which is from the capacity of transaction log files. In the case of heavy updating workload, the modified ages of [...]
read_ahead (disabled) as steroid
May 12, 2009 By 4 Comments
Last week we were busy to align XtraDB performance with 5.4, now we have some results. Currently it is available as “hacks” to XtraDB (available on Lauchpad lp:~percona-dev/percona-xtradb/hacks-porting-tune if you are interested). Basically we took improvements from 5.4 and backported ones performance related to XtraDB. Here are results for tpcc-like workload, 100W (~10GB) ( raw [...]
