One of the approaches we are using to look at MySQL scalability is to identify and if possible eliminate hot locks inside MySQL. For locks that cannot be eliminated, we are looking at ways to reduce the mutex hold times, or replace the critical sections with lock-free algorithms. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to be done if we are to make MySQL more scalable.

Along the way we're planning to blog about how we identified and eliminated performance bottlenecks and provide you with all the gory details about the process and technique. This will hopefully entice you all to contribute to fixing performance issues We can reach our goal of a highly scalable MySQL much faster!. If you any other ideas about how we can scale the MySQL scalability effort (pun intended), or you would like to bust some locks, please feel free to let us know.

Fixing locks is sometimes very tricky as sometimes eliminating a really hot lock can only …

One of the approaches we are using to look at MySQL scalability is to identify and if possible eliminate hot locks inside MySQL. For locks that cannot be eliminated, we are looking at ways to reduce the mutex hold times, or replace the critical sections with lock-free algorithms. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to be done if we are to make MySQL more scalable.

Along the way we're planning to blog about how we identified and eliminated performance bottlenecks and provide you with all the gory details about the process and technique. This will hopefully entice you all to contribute to fixing performance issues We can reach our goal of a highly scalable MySQL much faster!. If you any other ideas about how we can scale the MySQL scalability effort (pun intended), or you would like to bust some locks, please feel free to let us know.

Fixing locks is sometimes very tricky as sometimes eliminating a really hot lock can only …

For those of you interested in getting maximum performance out of your DRBD-based HA clusters, I am hosting a webinar on the subject on Wednesday, 8/27 at 1800 UTC (2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific).

The webinar is offered free of charge and it’s already pretty tight in terms of attendance, the event being limited to a maximum of 60 attendees. But if you’re quick, you might still stand a chance of grabbing a front-row seat. Check out this page on our website, it has all the relevant information.

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While we were mostly excited to become part of Sun, there was at least one drawback too. MySQL had a worldwide policy of "Scandinavian style" 5 week vacations per year (4 Summer, 1 Winter week). Sun doesn't have such a worldwide policy, so most of us lost some vacation days there. But there is one group of employees that still enjoy this benefit... those of us that actually live in Scandinavia!

Those 4 weeks are however now gone for my part :-( So I thought I'll make a soft start to working by a) yesterday doing almost nothing and b) today blogging. A long long time ago before I left for my vacation Mark Callaghan requested more blog posts about MySQL Cluster, so I thought why not start with one right now. As previously noted there are many good MySQL Cluster bloggers out there, but admittedly some of their blog postings can be very …

While we were mostly excited to become part of Sun, there was at least one drawback too. MySQL had a worldwide policy of "Scandinavian style" 5 week vacations per year (4 Summer, 1 Winter week). Sun doesn't have such a worldwide policy, so most of us lost some vacation days there. But there is one group of employees that still enjoy this benefit... those of us that actually live in Scandinavia!

Those 4 weeks are however now gone for my part :-( So I thought I'll make a soft start to working by a) yesterday doing almost nothing and b) today blogging. A long long time ago before I left for my vacation Mark Callaghan requested more blog posts about MySQL Cluster, so I thought why not start with one right now. As previously noted there are many good MySQL Cluster bloggers out there, but admittedly some of their blog postings can be very …

While we were mostly excited to become part of Sun, there was at least one drawback too. MySQL had a worldwide policy of "Scandinavian style" 5 week vacations per year (4 Summer, 1 Winter week). Sun doesn't have such a worldwide policy, so most of us lost some vacation days there. But there is one group of employees that still enjoy this benefit... those of us that actually live in Scandinavia!

Those 4 weeks are however now gone for my part :-( So I thought I'll make a soft start to working by a) yesterday doing almost nothing and b) today blogging. A long long time ago before I left for my vacation Mark Callaghan requested more blog posts about MySQL Cluster, so I thought why not start with one right now. As previously noted there are many good MySQL Cluster bloggers out there, but admittedly some of their blog postings can be very …

High Performance MySQL, Second Edition
Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More

By Baron Schwartz , Peter Zaitsev , Vadim Tkachenko , Jeremy Zawodny , Arjen Lentz , Derek J. Balling
Second Edition June 2008
Pages: 708
ISBN 10: 0-596-10171-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596101718

When I first read about this book, I figured many sections would be over my head. I was pleasantly surprised when I …

I have completed a rough draft of the first chapter of "Drupal Performance and Scalability". The first chapter of this online book is divided into four sections, the first of which focuses on the importance of fully defining your performance and scalability goals, helping you to identify what you need to accomplish and how to set concrete and attainable goals. The second section discusses monitoring and measuring your ongoing progress, helping you decide what you need to monitor, and how to monitor it. The …

Brian Aker gives the "zinger" lightning talk about the newly announced "Drizzle". This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker's highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL -- both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

In this blog I will talk about how we (the Sun/MySQL Performance Team) eliminated the need for a lock to get better scalability with MySQL 5.1.24+.

While comparing sysbench runs using two different versions of MySQL 5.1, I noticed a big difference in the system utilization. One version had much more idle time than the other. This difference was much more apparent with high thread counts on machines with lots of CPU. A look at the system calls showed a large number of lwp_park system calls. That is, threads were being put to sleep.

bash # $ dtrace -qn 'syscall:::entry{@c[probefunc]=count()}' -n tick-5s'{trunc(@c, 10);exit(0)}'

  p_online                                                       1535
  ioctl                                                          2255
  fcntl                                                          6134
  priocntlsys                                                    6462
  write …