Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
Introducing new type of benchmark
February 25, 2012 By 16 Comments
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 [...]
Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition
December 16, 2011 By 9 Comments
There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
June 9, 2011 By 13 Comments
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
Distributed Set Processing with Shard-Query
May 14, 2011 By 27 Comments
Can Shard-Query scale to 20 nodes? Peter asked this question in comments to to my previous Shard-Query benchmark. Actually he asked if it could scale to 50, but testing 20 was all I could due to to EC2 and time limits. I think the results at 20 nodes are very useful to understand the performance: [...]
The two even more fundamental performance metrics
May 5, 2011 By 6 Comments
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 [...]
The four fundamental performance metrics
April 27, 2011 By 15 Comments
There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]
Percona white paper: Forecasting MySQL Scalability
November 16, 2010 By 6 Comments
Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers. One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
MySQL Server Variables – SQL layer or Storage Engine specific.
June 8, 2006 By 14 Comments
MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and [...]
