May 22, 2013

Virident vCache vs. FlashCache: Part 2

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]

MySQL 5.6 – InnoDB Memcached Plugin as a caching layer

A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]

Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb ?

There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ? I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much [...]

Goal driven performance optimization

When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

Web Site Optimization: FrontEnd and BackEnd

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week on Velocity Conference It was quite interesting event worth attending and it was very good to see the problems in this are going beyond Apache, PHP, Memcache and MySQL. A lot of talks on this conference was focusing on what is called “FrontEnd”. The meaning of Frontend is [...]

Lighttpd as reverse proxy

We often recommend to set lighttpd in front of apache to handle http requests (more about http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/05/21/speedup-your-lamp-stack-with-lighttpd/ ) , redirect dynamic requests to apache and handle static files by itself. I just gathered step-by-step instruction how to do that in 10 minutes, as it may be not so obvious.

Economics of Performance Optimization

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 [...]

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

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 [...]

Why do you need many apache children ?

I already wrote kind of about same topic a while ago and now interesting real life case makes me to write again Most Web applications we’re working with have single tier web architecture, meaning there is just single set of apache servers server requests and nothing else – no dedicated server for static content, no [...]