Master/slave replication is an important tool that gets used in many ways: distributing read loads among many slaves for performance, using a slave for backups so the master can handle live load, geographically distributed disaster recovery, etc. The Achilles’ Heal of slave performance is that slave workloads are single-threaded. The master can have many clients inserting, updating, querying, whereas the slave has only one insertion client: the master. InnoDB single-client performance is much slower than its multi-client performance, which means that the bottleneck in a master/slave system is often the rate at which a slave can keep up.

If the master has an average transactions per second (tps) that is higher than what the slave can handle, the slave will fall further and further behind. If the slaves are being used to distribute read workload, for example, the

We are excited to announce TokuDB® v6.0, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

This version offers feature and performance enhancements over previous releases, support for XA (two-phase transactional commits), better compression, and reduced performance variability associated with checkpointing. This release also brings TokuDB support up to date on MySQL v5.1, MySQL v5.5 and MariaDB v5.2. There’s a lot of great technical stuff under the hood in this release and I’ll be reviewing the improvements one-by-one over the course of this week.

I’ll be posting more details about the new features and performance, so here’s an overview of what’s in store.