If you attended my latest Troubleshooting MySQL Concurrency Issues with Load Testing Tools webinar you learned how I exploit benchmarking tools to replicate locking issues and crashes. But I told you nothing about proper use of these tools: for reliable benchmarks. I did not tell you that for a reason… I am just a Support Engineer and not a benchmarking expert.

And I have a dream. I want to invite world famous MySQL benchmarking experts for a Percona webinar and ask them for their secrets. I have a pretty long list of my own questions, but in order to make 1-hour webinar productive, we need to concentrate on just a few of the hottest ones. Therefore I need your help.

Please add your questions into the comments field of this blog post. Then we will choose the most important and/or most popular of …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the Troubleshooting MySQL Concurrency Issues with Load Testing Tools webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending my May 23, 2018, webinar on troubleshooting tools for MySQL. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I was unable to answer fully during the webinar.

Q: What do you recommend for benchmarking NDB cluster? Which should be used and how?

A: The issue with benchmarking NDB cluster is not the tool choice, but …

Generally TPC-C benchmark workload is considered as one of the #1 references for Database OLTP Performance. On the same time, for MySQL users it's often not something which is seen as "the most compelling" for performance evaluations.. -- well, when you're still fighting to scale with your own very simple queries, any good result on something more complex may only look as "fake" ;-)) So, since a long time Sysbench workloads remained (and will remain) as the main #1 "entry ticket" for MySQL evaluation -- the most simple to install, to use, and to point on some sensible issues (if any). Specially that since new Sysbench version 1.0 a lot of improvements were made in Sysbench code itself, it really scales now, has the lowest ever overhead, and also allowing you to add your own test scenario via extended LUA scripts (and again, with lowest ever overhead) -- so, anyone can easily add …

As part of my benchmarks of binary logs, I’ve decided to check how the recently released MySQL 8.0 performance is affected in similar scenarios, especially as binary logs are enabled by default. It is also interesting to check how MySQL 8.0 performs against the claimed performance improvements in redo logs subsystem.

I will use a similar setup as in my last blog with MySQL 8.0, using the utf8mb4 charset.

I have a few words about MySQL 8.0 tuning. Dimitri’s recommends in his blog posts using innodb_undo_log_truncate=off and …

I want to take a closer look at MySQL performance with binary logs enabled on different filesystems, especially as MySQL 8.0 comes with binary logs enabled by default.

As part of my benchmarks of the MyRocks storage engine, I’ve noticed an unusual variance in throughput for the InnoDB storage engine, even though we spent a lot of time making it as stable as possible in Percona Server for MySQL. In the end, the culprit was enabled binary logs. There is also always the question, “If there is a problem with EXT4, does XFS perform differently?” To answer that, I will repeat the same benchmark on the EXT4 and XFS filesystems.

You can find our previous experiments with binary logs here: …

In this blog post, I’ll look at MyRocks performance through some benchmark testing.

As the MyRocks storage engine (based on the RocksDB key-value store http://rocksdb.org ) is now available as part of Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, I wanted to take a look at how it performs on a relatively high-end server and SSD storage. I wanted to check how it performs for different amounts of available memory for the given database size. This is similar to the benchmark I published a while ago for InnoDB (https://www.percona.com/blog/2010/04/08/fast-ssd-or-more-memory/).

In this case, I plan to use a sysbench-tpcc benchmark ( …

Welcome to Percona Live 2018 keynotes, day one!

Percona Live 2018 is up and running! We call this day one, but in reality, yesterday was filled with tutorials that provided excellent and practical information on how to get your MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB and PostgreSQL environments up, running and optimized.

Today we started with keynote presentations from Percona, a technology panel, Oracle and Netflix. You can view the recording of today’s keynotes here.

Percona Welcome

Laurie Coffin (Percona)

…

What is an InnoDB Buffer Pool?

InnoDB buffer pool is the memory space that holds many in-memory data structures of InnoDB, buffers, caches, indexes and even row-data. innodb_buffer_pool_size is the MySQL configuration parameter that specifies the amount of memory allocated to the InnoDB buffer pool by MySQL. This is one of the most important settings in the MySQL configuration and should be configured based on the available system RAM.

In this post, we’ll walk you through two approaches of setting your InnoDB buffer pool size value, examine the pros and cons of those practices, and also propose a unique method to arrive at an optimum value based on the size of …

In this blog post, I’ll be looking at a new tool Proxytop for managing MySQL topologies using ProxySQL. Proxytop is a self-contained, real-time monitoring tool for ProxySQL. As some of you already know ProxySQL is a popular open source, high performance and protocol-aware proxy server for MySQL and its forks (Percona and MariaDB).

My lab uses MySQL and ProxySQL on Docker containers provided by Nick Vyzas. This lab also uses Alexey Kopytov’s Sysbench utility to perform benchmarking against ProxySQL.

Pre-requisites:

• Install Proxytop
• Install …

In this post I’ll look at some of our recent work for benchmark enthusiasts: a TPCC-like workload for Sysbench (version 1.0 or later).

Despite being 25 years old, the TPC-C benchmark can still provide an interesting intensive workload for a database in my opinion. It runs multi-statement transactions and is write-heavy. We also decided to use Sysbench 1.0, which allows much more flexible LUA scripting that allows us to implement TPCC-like workload.

For a long time, we used the tpcc-mysql (https://github.com/Percona-Lab/tpcc-mysql) tool for performance evaluations of MySQL and Percona Server for MySQL, but we recognize that the tool is far from being intuitive and simple to use. So we hope the adaptation for Sysbench will …