The question “what problems will I have when migrating to the cloud” gets asked often enough. If by cloud you mean Amazon EC2, then from a technical perspective there isn’t much that changes. The biggest thing that changes is just how you pay your bill. Having said that, there’s still a few potential gotchas: There [...]
SSD, XFS, LVM, fsync, write cache, barrier and lost transactions
We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two RAID controllers (Perc/6i and HighPoint 2300). The [...]
Pretending to fix broken group commit
The problem with broken group commit was discusses many times, bug report was reported 3.5Â years ago and still not fixed in MySQLÂ 5.0/5.1 (and most likely will not be in MySQLÂ 5.1). Although the rough truth is this bug is very hard (if possible) to fix properly. In short words if you enable replication (log-bin) on server [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
How much overhead DRDB could cause ?
I was working with the customer today investigating MySQL over DRBD performance issues. His basic question was why there is so much overhead with DRBD in my case, while it is said there should be no more than 30% overhead when DRBD is used. The truth is – because how DRBD works it does not [...]
How multiple disks can benefit for single client workload ?
Let us talk few more about disks. You might have read my previous post and Matt’s Reply and it looks like there are few more things to clarify and explain. Before I get to main topic of the article lets comment on IO vs Disk question. If you look at Disk Based databases all data [...]
Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL Needs
I’m often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I’ve decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the [...]
RAID System performance surprises
Implementing MySQL database in 24/7 environments we typically hope for uniform component performance, or at least would like to be able to control it. Typically this is indeed the case, for example CPU will perform with same performance day and night (unless system management software decides to lower CPU frequency due to overheating). This is [...]
Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II
I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]

