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 [...]
Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)
May 6, 2011 By 23 Comments
Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
March 31, 2011 By 57 Comments
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
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 [...]
Battery Learning still problem many years after
February 10, 2011 By 7 Comments
The performance problems caused by battery auto learning go many years back. We wrote about it, other people from MySQL Community too. The situation did not get better, at least not with Dell RAID controllers, H700 and H800 have the same problem too. At the same time situation got worse as a lot more people [...]
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
February 3, 2011 By 19 Comments
Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.
More on dangers of the caches
September 23, 2010 By 5 Comments
I wrote couple of weeks ago on dangers of bad cache design. Today I’ve been troubleshooting the production down case which had fair amount of issues related to how cache was used. The deal was as following. The update to the codebase was performed and it caused performance issues, so it was rolled back but [...]
Should I buy a Fast SSD or more memory?
April 8, 2010 By 10 Comments
While a scale-out solution has traditionally been popular for MySQL, it’s interesting to see what room we now have to scale up – cheap memory, fast storage, better power efficiency. There certainly are a lot of options now – I’ve been meeting about a customer/week using Fusion-IO cards. One interesting choice I’ve seen people make [...]
Effect of adaptive_flushing
December 4, 2009 By 5 Comments
I recently had the chance to witness the effects of innodb_adaptive_flushing on the performance of InnoDB Plugin 1.0.5 in the wild, which Yasufumi wrote about previously here and here. The server in question was Solaris 10 with 8 disk RAID10 and 2 32GB SSDs used for ZIL and L2ARC, 72G RAM and 40G buffer pool. [...]
EC2/EBS single and RAID volumes IO benchmark
August 6, 2009 By 14 Comments
During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID [...]
