May 19, 2013

Find unused indexes

I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

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 [...]

Percona Server with XtraDB Case Study, Behind the Scenes

We’ve published our first case study. The customer, ideeli, had a database that was struggling on standard MySQL and InnoDB. The big win was the upgrade to XtraDB. The business continued to grow quickly, and months later under much more traffic, the database is still outperforming their previous version. I thought I’d write a few [...]

Cache Miss Storm

I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything [...]

Scaling: Consider both Size and Load

So lets imagine you have the server handling 100.000 user accounts. You can see the CPU,IO and Network usage is below 10% of capacity – does it mean you can count on server being able to handle 1.000.000 of accounts ? Not really, and there are few reasons why, I’ll name most important of them: [...]

Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine

(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]

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 [...]

MySQL 5.0, 5.1 and Innodb Plugin CPU Efficiency

We’ve recently done benchmarks comparing different MySQL versions in terms of their CPU efficiently in TPC-C like Workload. We did it couple of weeks ago so MySQL 5.0.67, MySQL 5.1.29 and Innodb Plugin 1.0.1 were used which are not very recent, though we do not think results will differ a lot with today versions.

Drilling down to the source of the problem

I had an interesting tuning case few days ago. The system serving high traffic using Innodb tables would be stalling every so often causing even very simple queries both reads and writes taking long time to complete, with progress almost paused (dropping from thousands to tens of queries per second). On the surface the problem [...]