In this blog post, I’ll look for the bottleneck that prevented the performance in my previous post from achieving better results.

The powerful machine I used in the tests in my previous post has a comparatively slow disk, and therefore I expected my tests would hit a point when I couldn’t increase performance further due to the disk speed.

Hardware configuration:

Processors: physical = 4, cores = 72, virtual = 144, hyperthreading = yes
Memory: 3.0T
Disk speed: about 3K …

In MySQL 5.6 InnoDB has a dedicated thread (page_cleaner) that’s responsible for performing flushing operations. Page_cleaner performs flushing of the dirty pages from the buffer pool based on two factors:
- access pattern  -  the least recently used pages will be flushed by LRU flusher from LRU_list when buffer pool has no free pages anymore;
- age – the oldest modified non-flushed pages are part of flush_list structure and will be flushed by flush_list flusher based on several heuristics.

There is a good overview of the page_cleaner and also here you may find some details about flushing in MySQL 5.6. Below I describe several additional aspects of the flush_list flushing that was not really …