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 …
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