New versions of MySQL are always interesting to try out. Often they have features which I may have asked for myself so it’s satisfying to see them eventually appear on a system I use. Often other new features make life easier for the DBA. Finally we hope overall performance will improve and managing the server(s) will be come easier.

So I had a system which needs to make heavy writes, and performance was a problem, even when writing to SSDs. Checkpointing seemed to be the big issue and the ib_logfile size in MySQL 5.5 is limited to 4 GB. That seems a lot, but once MySQL starts to fill these files (and this happens at ~70% of the total I believe),  checkpointing kicks in heavily, and slows things down.  So the main reason for trying out MySQL 5.6 was to see how things performed with larger ib_logfiles. (Yes, MariaDB 5.5 can do this too.)

Things improved a lot for my specific workload which was great news, but one thing …

The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6.

As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to:

· Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data)

· Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog)

The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application …