Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*. MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database. Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – [...]
Testing STEC SSD MACH16 200GB SLC
Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.
Testing Samsung SSD SATA 256GB 830 – not all SSD created equal
I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, [...]
ext4 vs xfs on SSD
As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]
Testing the Group Commit Fix
As you may know, Kristian Nielsen made a fix for the Group Commit Problem which we many times wrote about. The fix came into MariaDB 5.3 and Mark Callaghan tested it recently . We ported this patch to Percona Server (it is not in the main branch yet), and here are the results of my [...]
Virtualization and IO Modes = Extra Complexity
It has taken a years to get a proper integration between operating system kernel, device driver and hardware to get behavior with caches and IO modes correctly. I remember us having a lot of troubles with fsync() not flushing hard drive write cache and so potential hard drives can be lost on power failure. Happily [...]
MySQL on Amazon RDS part 1: insert performance
Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is a cloud-hosted MySQL solution. I’ve had some clients hitting performance limitations on standard EC2 servers with EBS volumes (see SSD versus EBS death match), and one of them wanted to evaluate RDS as a replacement. It is built on the same technologies, but the hardware and networking are supposed [...]
RAID throughput on FusionIO
Along with maximal possible fsync/sec it is interesting how different software RAID modes affects throughput on FusionIO cards. In short conclusion, RAID10 modes really disappoint me, the detailed numbers to follow. To get numbers I run
1 | sysbench fileio |
test with 16KB page size, random read and writes, 1 and 16 threads, O_DIRECT mode. FusionIO cards are [...]
fsyncs on software raid on FusionIO
As soon as we get couple FusionIO cards, there is question how to join them in single space for database. FusionIO does not provide any mirroring/stripping solutions and totally relies on OS tools there. So for Linux we have software RAID and LVM, I tried to followup on my post How many fsync / sec [...]
How many fsync / sec FusionIO can handle
I recently was asked how many fsync / sec ( and therefore durable transactions / sec) we can get on FusionIO card. It should be easy to test, let’s take sysbench fileio benchmark and run, the next command should make it:
1 | ./sysbench --test=fileio --file-num=1 --file-total-size=50G --file-fsync-all=on --file-test-mode=seqrewr --max-time=100 --file-block-size=4096 --max-requests=0 run |
1 2 3 | Operations performed: 0 Read, 922938 Write, 922938 Other = 1845876 Total Read 0b Written 3.5207Gb Total transferred 3.5207Gb (36.052Mb/sec) 9229.35 Requests/sec executed |
So that’s 9229.35 req/sec, which is pretty impressive. For comparison the same [...]

