Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
Tuning for heavy writing workloads
For the my previous post, there was comment to suggest to test db_STRESS benchmark on XtraDB by Dimitri. And I tested and tuned for the benchmark. I will show you the tunings. It should be also tuning procedure for general heavy writing workloads. At first, <tuning peak performance>. The next, <tuning purge operation> to stabilize [...]
Which adaptive should we use?
As you may know, InnoDB has 2 limits for unflushed modified blocks in the buffer pool. The one is from physical size of the buffer pool. And the another one is oldness of the block which is from the capacity of transaction log files. In the case of heavy updating workload, the modified ages of [...]
read_ahead (disabled) as steroid
Last week we were busy to align XtraDB performance with 5.4, now we have some results. Currently it is available as “hacks” to XtraDB (available on Lauchpad lp:~percona-dev/percona-xtradb/hacks-porting-tune if you are interested). Basically we took improvements from 5.4 and backported ones performance related to XtraDB. Here are results for tpcc-like workload, 100W (~10GB) ( raw [...]
The perils of InnoDB with Debian and startup scripts
Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance. It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are [...]
5.0.75-build12 Percona binaries
After several important fixes to our patches we made binaries for build12. Fixes include: Control of InnoDB insert buffer to address problems Peter mentioned http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/01/13/some-little-known-facts-about-innodb-insert-buffer/, also check Bug 41811 to see symptoms of problem with Insert buffer. http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/patches:innodb_io_patches * innodb_flush_neighbor_pages (default 1) – When the dirty page are flushed (written to datafile), this parameter determines [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]
Adaptive checkpointing
Do you know that there are two limits about dirty (modified but not flushed to disk) blocks of InnoDB buffer pool? One is the limit of “amount”. The other is the limit of “age”. – limit of “amount” – As you know, buffer pool of InnoDB works as write-back cache of its datafiles. If the [...]
New SpecJAppServer results at MySQL and Sun.
As you likely have seen Sun has posted the new SpecJAppServer Results More information from Tom Daly can be found here These results are quite interesting for me as I worked on some of the previous SpecJAppServer Benchmarks several years ago while being employed by MySQL. These are great results, plus they can be relevant [...]
More patches
After some pause we are going to announce bunch of patches we made and ported for last period. Ported patches (ported from Google V2 patch): – innodb_fsync_source.patch – Show information about callers of fsync, more info – innodb_io_tune.patch – Port of two patches InnodbIOTune and InnodbAsync, more info – innodb_extra_status.patch – Show more information about [...]

