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 [...]
Percona white paper: Forecasting MySQL Scalability
November 16, 2010 By 6 Comments
Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers. One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the [...]
Percona Server scalability on multi-cores server
September 29, 2010 By 14 Comments
We now have hardware in our test lab that represents the next generation of commodity servers for databases. It’s a Cisco UCS C250 server, powered by two Intel Westmere CPUs (X5670 @ 2.93GHz). Each CPU has 6 cores and 12 threads. The most amazing part is the amount of memory. It has 384GB of RAM, which is [...]
FlashCache: tpcc workload with FusionIO card as cache
June 2, 2010 By 20 Comments
This run is very similar what I had on Intel SSD X25-M card, but now I use FusionIO 80GB SLC card. I chose this card as smallest available card (and therefore cheapest. On Dell.com you can see it for about $3K). There is also FusionIO IO-Xtreme 80GB card, which is however MLC based and it [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 2
October 16, 2009 By 8 Comments
Part 1 of our series set-up our “test” application and looked at boosting performance of the application by buffer MySQL with memcached. Our test application is simple and requires only 3 basic operations per transaction 2 reads and 1 write. Using memcached combined with MySQL we ended up nearly getting a 10X performance boost from [...]
Performance improvements in Percona 5.0.83 and XtraDB
July 14, 2009 By 27 Comments
There was small delay in our releases, part of this time we worked on features I mentioned before: – Moving InnoDB tables between servers – Improve InnoDB recovery time and rest time we played with performance trying to align XtraDB performance with MySQL 5.4 ® and also port all performance fixes to 5.0 tree. So [...]
RAID vs SSD vs FusionIO
May 1, 2009 By 17 Comments
In benchmarks passion (see my two previous posts) I managed to setup all three devices (RAID was on board; Intel X25-E SSD connected to HighPoint controller, FusionIO card) on our working horse Dell PowerEdge R900 (btw, to do that I had to switch from CentOS 5.2 to Ubuntu 8.10, as CentOS was not able to [...]
Detailed review of Tokutek storage engine
April 28, 2009 By 21 Comments
(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion) I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box [...]
xtrabackup-0.3, binaries and stream backup
March 13, 2009 By 11 Comments
We are coming with next version of xtrabackup – online backup solution for MySQL 5.0 / 5.1 and InnoDB standard version, plugin modification and XtraDB. We still consider it as alpha version, though it shows perfect stable results in our tests. Let me address two often asked question about xtrabackup: 1) Does it work only [...]
