May 21, 2013

Intel SSD 910 vs HDD RAID in tpcc-mysql benchmark

I continue my benchmarks of Intel SSD 910, previous time I compared it with Fusion-io ioDrive http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/09/07/intel-ssd-910-in-tpcc-mysql-benchmark/. Now I want to test this card against RAID over spinning disks.

Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections

The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]

ALTER TABLE: Creating Index by Sort and Buffer Pool Size

Today I was looking at the ALTER TABLE performance with fast index creation and without it with different buffer pool sizes. Results are pretty interesting. I used modified Sysbench table for these tests because original table as initially created only has index on column K which initially contains only zeros, which means index is very [...]

DROP TABLE and stalls: Lazy Drop Table in Percona Server and the new fixes in MySQL

Suppose you have turned on innodb_file_per_table (which means that each table has its own tablespace), and you have to drop tables in a background every hour or every day. If its once every day then you can probably schedule the table dropping process to run during off-peak hours. But I have seen cases where the [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

The relationship between Innodb Log checkpointing and dirty Buffer pool pages

This is a time-honored topic, and there’s no shortage of articles on the topic on this blog. I wanted to write a post trying to condense and clarify those posts, as it has taken me a while to really understand this relationship. Some basic facts Most of us know that writing into Innodb updates buffer [...]

Looking for RAID Controller without Battery Learning problems ?

A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they [...]

Optimizing InnoDB for creating 30,000 tables (and nothing else)

Once upon a time, it would have been considered madness to even attempt to create 30,000 tables in InnoDB. That time is now a memory. We have customers with a lot more tables than a mere 30,000. There have historically been no tests for anything near this many tables in the MySQL test suite. So, [...]

MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache

or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]