We raised topic of problems with flushing in InnoDB several times, some links: InnoDB Flushing theory and solutions MySQL 5.5.8 in search of stability This was not often recurring problem so far, however in my recent experiments, I observe it in very simple sysbench workload on hardware which can be considered as typical nowadays.
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
June 9, 2011 By 13 Comments
In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]
InnoDB Flushing: Theory and solutions
April 4, 2011 By 23 Comments
I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory. The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In [...]
Different flavors of InnoDB flushing
January 13, 2011 By 9 Comments
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 [...]
Effect from innodb log block size 4096 bytes
January 3, 2011 By 19 Comments
In my post MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive I mentioned that I used innodb-log-block-size=4096 in Percona Server to get better throughput, but later Dimitri in his article MySQL Performance: Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5 sounded doubt that it really makes sense. Here us quote from his article: “Question: what is a [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
January 3, 2011 By 11 Comments
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
November 22, 2010 By 2 Comments
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
SSD, XFS, LVM, fsync, write cache, barrier and lost transactions
March 2, 2009 By 32 Comments
We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two RAID controllers (Perc/6i and HighPoint 2300). The [...]
