A few weeks ago I wrote about “MySQL Performance at High Concurrency” and why it is important, which was followed up by Vadim’s post on ThreadPool in Percona Server providing some great illustration on the topic. This time I want to target an opposite question: why MySQL performance at low concurrency is important for you. [...]
Read/Write Splitting with PHP Webinar Questions Followup
Today I gave a presentation on “Read/Write Splitting with PHP” for Percona Webinars. If you missed it, you can still register to view the recording and my slides. Thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to folks who asked the great questions. I answered as many as I could during the session, but here are [...]
MySQL: what read_buffer_size value is optimal ?
The more I work with MySQL Performance Optimization and Optimization for other applications the better I understand I have to less believe in common sense or common sense of documentation writers and do more benchmarks and performance research. I just recently wrote about rather surprising results with sort performance and today I’ve discovered even read_buffer_size [...]
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]
Database problems in MySQL/PHP Applications
Article about database design problems is being discussed by Kristian. Both article itself and responce cause mixed feellings so I decided it is worth commenting: 1. Using mysql_* functions directly This is probably bad but I do not like solutions proposed by original article ether. PEAR is slow as well as other complex conectors. I [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]
Using MyISAM in production
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
MySQL Server Memory Usage
Every so often people ask me the question how should they estimate memory consumption by MySQL Server in given configuration. What is the formula they could use. The reasons to worry about memory usage are quite understandable. If you configure MySQL Server so it uses too small amount of memory it will likey perform suboptimally. [...]

