May 21, 2013

Followup on performance metrics: slides, video

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof. I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and [...]

Scaling problems still exist in MySQL 5.5 and Percona Server 5.5

MySQL 5.5 and Percona Server 5.5 do not solve all scalability problems even for read only workloads. Workloads which got a lot of attention such as Sysbench and DBT2/TPC-C scale pretty well a they got a lot of attention, there can be other quite typical workloads however which do not scale that well. This is [...]

InnoDB compression woes

InnoDB compression is getting some traction, and I see quite contradictory opinions. Someone has successful deployments in productions, and someone says that compression in current implementation is useless. To get some initial impression about performance I decided to run some sysbench with multi-tables benchmarks. I actually was preparing to do complex research, but even first [...]

The two even more fundamental performance metrics

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

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. [...]

Performance Schema overhead

As continuation of my CPU benchmarks it is interesting to see what is scalability limitation in MySQL 5.6.2, and I am going to check that using PERFORMANCE SCHEMA, but before that let’s estimate what is potential overhead of using PERFORMANCE SCHEMA. So I am going to run the same benchmarks (sysbench read-only and read-write) as [...]

Intel Nehalem vs AMD Opteron shootout in sysbench workload

Having two big boxes in our lab, one based Intel Nehalem (Cisco UCS C250) and second on AMD Opteron (Dell PowerEdge R815), I decided to run some simple sysbench benchmark to compare how both CPUs perform and what kind of scalability we can expect.

Percona’s Sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo

I just realized that we haven’t blogged a list of our sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo (#mysqlconf) yet. Here is a hopefully complete list.

Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions

There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]

Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?

Before I begin, a disclaimer. VoltDB is not a customer, and did not pay Percona or me to investigate VoltDB’s scalability or publish this blog post. More disclaimers at the end. Short version: VoltDB is very scalable; it should scale to 120 partitions, 39 servers, and 1.6 million complex transactions per second at over 300 [...]