Over the last few years, Domas’s technique of using GDB as a profiler has become a key tool in helping us analyze MySQL when customers are having trouble. We have our own implementation of it in Percona Toolkit (pt-pmp) and we gather GDB backtraces from pt-stalk and pt-collect. Although it’s helped us figure out a [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
June 9, 2011 By 18 Comments
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
Death match! EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS
February 21, 2011 By 55 Comments
Is it a good idea to deploy your database into the cloud? It depends. I have seen it work well many times, and cause trouble at other times. In this blog post I want to examine cloud-based I/O. I/O matters a lot when a) the database’s working set is bigger than the server’s memory, or [...]
Paul McCullagh answers your questions about PBXT
November 20, 2009 By 2 Comments
Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions – as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul! What’s the “ideal” use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I [...]
Rendundant Array of Inexpensive Servers
August 21, 2008 By 15 Comments
So you need to design highly available MySQL powered system… how do you approach that ? Too often I see the question is approached by focusing on expensive hardware which in theory should be reliable. And this really can work quite well for small systems. It is my experience – with quality commodity hardware (Dell,HP,IBM [...]
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
August 7, 2008 By 6 Comments
One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]
How SHOW SLAVE STATUS relates to CHANGE MASTER TO
July 7, 2008 By 21 Comments
As you probably know MySQL Replication (statement based) works by fetching statements from MASTERs binary log and executing them on the SLAVE. Since MySQL 4.0 this process is a bit more involved having events passing via relay logs on the Slave which also means there are two replication threads “IO Thread” and “SQL Thread” used [...]
The tool I’ve been waiting for years
March 18, 2008 By 10 Comments
I’ve just been pointed to the nice tool which I was waiting for years to see. It is fincore – little perl script which allows you to see what pages of file are cached in OS memory. This is really cool.
