I was working with customer today which has MySQL on a system with some 64GB or RAM running MyISAM, so they set key_buffer_size to 16G… and every few days MySQL crashes. Why ? Because key_buffer_size over 4GB in size is not really supported (checked with latest and greatest MySQL Enterprise 5.0.34). It works just fine [...]
InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1
January 8, 2007 By 117 Comments
Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]
COUNT(*) for Innodb Tables
December 1, 2006 By 32 Comments
I guess note number one about MyISAM to Innodb migration is warning what Innodb is very slow in COUNT(*) queries. The part which I often however see omitted is fact it only applies to COUNT(*) queries without WHERE clause. So if you have query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM USER It will be much faster for [...]
Using LVM for MySQL Backup and Replication Setup
August 21, 2006 By 53 Comments
If someone asks me about MySQL Backup advice my first question would be if they have LVM installed or have some systems with similar features set for other operation systems. Veritas File System can do it for Solaris. Most SAN systems would work as well. What is really needed is ability to create atomic snapshot [...]
MySQL Crash Recovery
July 30, 2006 By 30 Comments
MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things – MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only [...]
What MySQL buffer cache hit rate should you target
June 29, 2006 By 5 Comments
“What cache hit rate is good for optimal MySQL Performance” is typical question I’m asked. It could by MyISAM key_buffer or Innodb innodb_buffer_pool it does not really matter. In both cases trying to come up with constant “good” hit rate is looking for trouble. Well of course you can name 100% hit rate and all [...]
Using MyISAM in production
June 17, 2006 By 36 Comments
There were recently number of posts about MyISAM, for example Arjen wrote pretty nice article about MyISAM features so I thought I would share my own view on using MyISAM in production. For me it is not only about table locks. Table locks is only one of MyISAM limitations you need to consider using it [...]
FreeBSD tests
June 15, 2006 By 15 Comments
I’m continuing my experiments with different OS and today I tested FreeBSD 6.0 on my box. (more details about box and benchmark see here http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/06/13/quick-look-at-ubuntu-606/). Initially I was very pessimistic about FreeBSD, as results were (in transactions/sec, more is better. for comparison the results from Suse 10.0): InnoDB threads FreeBSD 6 Suse 10.0 Suse/ FreeBSD [...]
MyISAM concurrent insert
June 13, 2006 By 12 Comments
Arjen posted a good note about MyISAM concurrent-insert features, though I should mention concurrent-insert can be cause of scalablity and peformance problems on SMP boxes, especially on queries processing range-queries. The reason of problems is POSIX read-write locks, which are used to protect key_buffer from concurrent changes and called for each processed row. More info [...]
Quick look at Ubuntu 6.06
June 13, 2006 By 3 Comments
There are a lot of talks around new coming Ubuntu 6.06, so I decided to make quick benchmarks. I used sysbench 0.4.6 oltp-read-only workload with 1000000 rows against InnoDB and MyISAM tables. Such workload is CPU-bound and allows to compare CPU / OS if we are using the same version of MySQL. So I used [...]
