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 Wish for 2013 – Better Memory Accounting
With Performance Schema improvements in MySQL 5.6 I think we’re in the good shape with insight on what is causing performance bottlenecks as well as where CPU resources are spent. (Performance Schema does not accounts CPU usage directly but it is something which can be relatively easily derived from wait and stage information). Where we’re [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
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 [...]
Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.0 GA
I’m really excited to today announce the first GA (Generally Available; i.e. stable) release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0. We have worked hard since our last major release on improving the reliability and user experience of Percona XtraBackup as well as adding features to make it better suited to more environments. The 2.0.0 release contains no [...]
How Innodb Contention may manifest itself
Even though multiple fixes have been implemented in Percona Server and MySQL 5.5, there are still workloads in which case mutex (or rw-lock) contention is a performance limiting factor, helped by ever growing number of cores available in the systems. It is interesting though the contention may manifest itself in the different form from the [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
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 [...]
Effect from innodb log block size 4096 bytes
In my post MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive I mentioned that I used innodb-log-block-size=4096 in Percona Server to get better throughput, but later Dimitri in his article MySQL Performance: Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5 sounded doubt that it really makes sense. Here us quote from his article: “Question: what is a [...]
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: [...]

