May 19, 2013

Why you don’t want to shard.

August 6, 2009 By 34 Comments

Note: This blog post is part 1 of 4 on building our training workshop.

The Percona training workshop will not cover sharding. If you follow our blog, you’ll notice we don’t talk much about the subject; in some cases it makes sense, but in many we’ve seen that it causes architectures to be prematurely complicated.

So let me state it: You don’t want to shard.

Optimize everything else first, and then if performance still isn’t good enough, it’s time to take a very bitter medicine. The reason you need to shard basically comes down to one of these two reasons

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Understanding Performance Optimization Terminology

March 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment

There are few terms you need to have a good understanding if you’re working with high volume systems. I commonly see these mixed and people not understanding the difference between them. Performance – The performance comes down to performing up to users expectations (or expectations of your boss) which drills down to two important metrics [...]

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Announce: Front End Performance Optimization

October 10, 2008 By 8 Comments

I guess many of you know us and so our company for MySQL related services. It is true this is majority of our business at this point but it is far from everything. Our goal in reality is to help people to build and operate quality systems, typically web sites, which means we help customers [...]

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What is stored InnoDB buffer pool

September 28, 2008 By 8 Comments

Ever wonder what is stored in InnoDB buffer pool at the moment ? It is not so hard actually – we made a short patch for MySQL 5.0 which show innodb buffer pool content

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Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase

August 7, 2008 By 6 Comments

One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]

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MySQL Performance on Memory Appliance

March 31, 2008 By 23 Comments

Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on “Memory Appliance” by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system. I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon [...]

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Sharding and Time Base Partitioning

March 14, 2008 By 12 Comments

For large number of online applications once you implemented proper sharding you can consider your scaling problems solved – by getting more and more hardware you can grow. As I recently wrote it however does not mean it is the most optimal way by itself to do things. The “classical” sharding involves partitioning by user_id,site_id [...]

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Economics of Performance Optimization

March 13, 2008 By 9 Comments

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]

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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 [...]

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Read Buffers, mmap, malloc and MySQL Performance

September 12, 2007 By 8 Comments

Monty Taylor posted interesting investigation of the fact read_buffer_size variable affects connection speed. This is not something you would expect right ? me too. Not only global user data is expected to be cached on startup but even if it is not why would you do full table scan to fetch single user information ? [...]

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