Introduction

The purpose of this test is to benchmark MySQL 5.6 performance on hardware with Haswell CPUs, SSDs and PCIe Flash storage devices.

Background

Software

• SysBench OLTP workload installed on the database machine
  
• MySQL 5.6.24 distribution from Percona
  
• jemalloc used for MySQL Server and Sysbench test client
  
• Charts are plotted using MySQL Performance Analyzer

Method

• Data and software on server was wiped out post every test run.
  
• Predefined number of tables - 16 or 64
  
• Predefined size of rows - 20M per table
  

Tests
Read Only
Read Write
Concurrencies vary from 1 to 512 with incremental increase
EXT4 vs XFS

…

Amazon recently announced RDS Aurora a new addition to their database as a service offerings. Here’s Mark Callaghan’s take on what’s happening under the hood and thoughts from Fusheng Han. Amazon is uniquely positioned with RDS to take on offerings like Clustrix. So it’s definitely worth reading Dave Anselmi’s take on Aurora. Join 28,000 others […]

Cloud service provider Backblaze has updated its earlier study of hard drive failure rates (Nov 2013) in its own infrastructure – from 27,000 to more than 34,000 drives, and the new report (Sep 2014) is quite informative. Hitachi comes out pretty high, Western Digital has produced some good drives, but Seagate tends to come out worst. Each brand does have good and not-so-good models so there’s no single right answer, and for any new model you’ll always be dealing with an unknown factor.

Backblaze also found that consumer drives actually perform well compared to enterprise grade drives, and once price is taking into account the enterprise drives just …

During April’s Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2014, I attended a talk on MySQL 5.7 performance an scalability given by Dimitri Kravtchuk, the Oracle MySQL benchmark specialist. He mentioned at some point that the InnoDB double write buffer was a real performance killer. For the ones that don’t know what the innodb double write buffer is, it is a disk buffer were pages are written before being written to the actual data file. Upon restart, pages in the double write buffer are rewritten to their data files if complete. This is to avoid data file corruption with half written pages. I knew it has an impact on performance, on ZFS since it is transactional I always disable it, but I never realized how important the performance impact could be. Back from PLMCE, a friend had dropped home a Dell R320 server, asking …

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce a special preview release of MariaDB 10.0.9 with significant performance gains on FusionIO devices. This is is a beta-quality preview release.

Download MariaDB 10.0.9-FusionIO preview

Background

The latest work between MariaDB and FusionIO has focused on dramatically improving performance of MariaDB on the high-end SSD drives produced by Fusion-IO and at the same time delivering much better endurance for the drives themselves. Furthermore, FusionIO flash memory solutions increase transactional database performance. MariaDB includes specialized improvements for FusionIO devices, leveraging a feature of the NVMFS filesystem on these popular, high performance solid state disks. Using this feature, MariaDB 10 can eliminate some of the overhead within the InnoDB storage engine …

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day in Australia – the biggest annual horse race event in the country, and in the state of Victoria it’s even a public holiday.

Open Query does work for Luxbet (part of Tabcorp), and Melbourne Cup day is by far their biggest day of the year in terms of traffic. It’s not just a big spike, there’s orders of magnitude difference so you can really say that the rest of the year is downright quiet (in relative terms). So, a very interesting load pattern.

Since last year Luxbet has upgraded from stock MySQL to MariaDB, and with our input made some other infrastructure modifications including moving to a pure solid state storage (FusionIO) solution as a SAN just won’t deliver the resilience and performance required. This may seem odd, but remember that a) …

ScienceLogic has a pretty fantastic network monitoring appliance.  So good in fact that InfoWorld gave it their "2013 Best Network Monitoring System on the Planet" award.  Inside their "ultraflexible, ultrascalable, carrier-grade" enterprise appliance, ScienceLogic relies on MySQL and has since their start in 2003.  Check out some of the things they've been able to do with MySQL and their reasons for continuing to use MySQL in these highlights from our new MySQL ScienceLogic case study.

• Science Logic's larger customers use their appliance to monitor and manage  20,000+ devices, each of which generates a steady stream of data and a workload that is 85% write. On …

I am working on a customer’s system where the requirement is to store a lot of timeseries data from different sensors.

For performance reasons we are going to use SSD, and therefore there is a list of requirements for the architecture:

• Provide high insertion rate
• Provide a good compression rate to store more data on expensive SSDs
• Engine should be SSD friendly (less writes per timeperiod to help with SSD wear)
• Provide a reasonable response time (within ~50 ms) on SELECT queries on hot recently inserted data

Looking on these requirements I actually think that TokuDB might be a good fit for this task.

There are several aspects to consider. This time I want to compare TokuDB vs InnoDB on an initial load time and space consumption.

Let’s …

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set comparison between vCache and FlashCache and also to conduct some benchmarks for the use case where the MySQL working set is significantly larger than the InnoDB buffer pool (thus leading to a lot of buffer pool disk reads) but still small enough to fit into the cache device. In this post and the next, I’ll present some of those results.

Disclosure: The research and testing for this post series was sponsored by Virident.

Usability is, to some extent, a subjective call, as I may have preferences …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …