How does Buffer Pool size affects Innodb Performance ? I always expected the effect to be positive, Innodb with large buffer pool to performing better. Including Recovery of course. I even blogged about it.
It turns out it is not always the case. Last week I was called to help with Innodb crash recovery on box with large amount of memory (64GB) with Innodb Buffer pool configured to be just a bit over 20GB. Innodb recovery was taking long hours with reasonably sized Innodb log files (256M) gradually progressing slower and slower so it was just about 50% after 3 hours with very little disk IO and one CPU 100% busy.
I took oprofile to see what exactly CPU is being spent for and saw the following picture:
samples % app name symbol name
1345161 95.2609 mysqld …