Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]
MySQL 5.6.10 Optimizer Limitations: Index Condition Pushdown
While preparing the webinar I will deliver this Friday, I ran into a quite interesting (although not very impacting) optimizer issue: a “SELECT *” taking half the time to execute than the same “SELECT one_indexed_column” query in MySQL 5.6.10. This turned into a really nice exercise for checking the performance and inner workings of one [...]
MySQL performance: Impact of memory allocators (Part 2)
Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario? [...]
Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013: The talks I want to see
I’ve been woefully neglectful of my responsibilities to post regularly about Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (PLCME 2013), but here’s some highlights of what I am planning to attend from the schedule. Read to the very bottom for the chance to win a free full pass to the conference! When picking talks to attend, [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
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 [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
Percona Toolkit Webinar followup Q&A
First, a thank you to everyone who attended the webinar Today, I appreciate your time and nice comments. As promised, here are answers to questions that couldn’t be answered during the talk: Q: How do you install the tools? The manual has full details, but it’s important to know that the latest release for [...]
Logging Deadlock errors
The principal source of information for InnoDB diagnostics is the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS but there are some sections that are not very useful. For example, LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK only shows, as the name implies, the latest error detected. If you have 100 deadlocks per minute you will be able to see only [...]
Announcing Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.27-23.6
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster on September 7th, 2012. Binaries are available from downloads area or from our software repositories. Features: Percona XtraDB Cluster supports tunable buffer size for fast index creation in InnoDB. This value was calculated based on the merge block size (which was hardcoded to 1 [...]
read_buffer_size can break your replication
There are some variables that can affect the replication behavior and sometimes cause some big troubles. In this post I’m going to talk about read_buffer_size and how this variable together with max_allowed_packet can break your replication. The setup is a master-master replication with the following values: max_allowed_packet = 32M read_buffer_size = 100M To break the [...]

