May 23, 2013

MySQL File System Fragmentation Benchmarks

Few days ago I wrote about testing writing to many files and seeing how this affects sequential read performance. I was very interested to see how it shows itself with real tables so I’ve got the script and ran tests for MyISAM and Innodb tables on ext3 filesystem. Here is what I found:

Why MySQL could be slow with large tables ?

If you’ve been reading enough database related forums, mailing lists or blogs you probably heard complains about MySQL being unable to handle more than 1.000.000 (or select any other number) rows by some of the users. On other hand it is well known with customers like Google, Yahoo, LiveJournal,Technocarati MySQL has installations with many billions [...]

Are larger buffers always better ?

Sometimes I see people thinking about buffers as “larger is always better” so if “large” MySQL sample configuration is designed for 2GB and they happen to have 16, they would simply multiply all/most values by 10 and hope it will work well. Obviously it does not. The least problem would be wasting memory, allocating a [...]