I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND. I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so. At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC [...]
White Paper: Flashcache and MySQL on Virident drive
Our latest MySQL white paper is Improving Percona Server performance with Flashcache on the Virident tachIOn Drive. (Virident funded the research, but as always, we wrote the report ourselves.) The conclusion is that Flashcache can be good for read-heavy workloads, but more research is needed to understand its performance characteristics on write-heavy workloads. We explain [...]
Finding an optimal balance of I/O, CPU, and RAM for MySQL
For a long time I’ve wanted to know how MySQL scales as you add more memory to the server. Vadim recently benchmarked the effects of increasing memory and CPU core count. He looked for a balance between utilizing the hardware as much as possible, limiting the system complexity, and lowering the price-to-performance ratio. The outcome [...]
Performance Schema tables stats
My previous benchmark on Performance Schema was mainly in memory workload and against single tables. Now after adding multi-tables support to sysbench, it is interesting to see what statistic we can get from workload that produces some disk IO. So let’s run sysbench against 100 tables, each 5000000 rows (~1.2G ) and buffer pool 30G. [...]
Percona Server Scales Vertically with Virident tachIOn Drives
We’ve published a new white paper that explains how to stop sharding and start scaling vertically with PCI-E flash drives, specifically the Virident tachIOn drive, which offers consistent, low-latency IO performance. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, so it’s a great feeling to have an explicitly recommended reference architecture: buy flash storage first, [...]
White Paper: “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently” from Percona and Virident
Percona was working closely with Virident on evaluating tachIOn as solution for MySQL, and as result you can find whitepaper “Scaling MySQL Deployments Efficiently Using Virident tachIOn Drives”, available from Virident website. It was done as part of our consulting practice, but all results and numbers are certified by Percona. I personally really enjoyed performance [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
In my recent benchmarks, such as this one about the Virident TachIon card, I used different values for innodb_buffer_pool_size, like 13GB, 52GB, and 144GB, for testing the tpcc-mysql database with size 100G. This was needed in order to test different memory/dataset size ratios. But why is it important, and how does it affect how InnoDB works [...]
How long is recovery from 8G innodb_log_file
In my previous posts I highlighted that one of improvements in Percona Server is support of innodb_log_file_size > 4G. This test was done using Percona Server 5.5.7, but the same performance expected for InnoDB-plugin and MySQL 5.5.
MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on Fast Flash card (Virident tachIOn)
This is to follow up on my previous post and show the results for MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server on the fastest hardware I have in our lab:Â a Cisco UCS C250 server with 384GB of RAM, powered by a Virident tachIOn 400GB SLC card. To see different I/O patterns, I used different innodb_buffer_pool_size settings: 13G, [...]
Write performance on Virident tachIOn card
This is crosspost from http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/. Disclaimer: The benchmarks were done as part of our consulting practice, but this post is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion. One of the biggest problems with solid state drives is that write performance may drop significantly with decreasing free space. I wrote about this before (http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/2010/07/free-space-and-write-performance/), using a [...]

