There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks
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 [...]
XtraDB benchmarks – 1.5X gain in IO-bound load
I guess it is first reaction on new storage engine – show me benefits. So there is benchmark I made on one our servers. It is Dell 2950 with 8CPU cores and RAID10 on 6 disks with BBU, and 32GB RAM on board with CentOS 5.2 as OS. This is quite typical server we recommend [...]
Performance impact of complex queries
What is often underestimated is impact of MySQL Performance by complex queries on large data sets(ie some large aggregate queries) and batch jobs. It is not rare to see queries which were taking milliseconds to stall for few seconds, especially in certain OS configurations, and on low profile servers (ie having only one disk drive) [...]
Operation Systems do not provide good IO interface for Database Servers
Thinking more about the problems I wrote about yesterday I had a question why so ugly workaround and guesses or manual configuration is needed ? The answer seems to be Operation Interfaces just do not provide IO interface which is good enough. The big missing piece is priority. There are process and threads priorities in [...]

