May 24, 2013

ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization

Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]

Handling big result sets

Sometime it is needed to handle a lot of rows on client side. Usual way is send query via mysql_query and than handle the result in loop mysql_fetch_array (here I use PHP functions but they are common or similar for all APIs, including C). Consider table:

Speedup your LAMP stack with LigHTTPD

Apache Web server could frequently be bottleneck for your LAMP stack, or you might be wasting resources on your web servers. The problem with Apache server comes from “client per process” architecture which you have to stick to at least for dynamic content served by PHP or ModPerl. With “client per process” you end up [...]

To pack or not to pack – MyISAM Key compression

MyISAM storage engine has key compression which makes its indexes much smaller, allowing better fit in caches and so improving performance dramatically. Actually packed indexes not a bit longer rows is frequent reason of MyISAM performing better than Innodb. In this article I’ll get in a bit more details about packed keys and performance implications [...]

Descending indexing and loose index scan

Comments to my previous posts, especially this one by Gokhan inspired me to write a bit about descending indexes and about loose index scan, or what Gokhan calls “better range” support. None of these are actially related to Innodb tables in general – these are features MySQL should get for all storage engines at some [...]