Percona Server for MySQL 8.0 comes with enterprise grade total data encryption features. However, there is always the question of how much overhead – or performance penalty – comes with the data decryption. As we saw in my networking performance post, SSL under high concurrency might be problematic. Is this the case for data decryption?

To measure any overhead, I will start with a simplified read-only workload, where data gets decrypted during read IO.

During query execution, the data in memory is already decrypted so there is no additional processing time. The decryption happens only for blocks that require a read from storage.

For the benchmark I will use the following workload:

sysbench …

This will be another post on using Percona Server via a Docker image. I want to follow up on my previous post regarding CPU/Network overhead in Docker “Measuring Percona Server Docker CPU/network overhead” by measuring  if there is any docker IO overhead on operations.

After running several tests, it appears (spoiler alert) that there is no Docker IO overhead. I still think it is useful to understand the different ways Docker can be used with data volumes, however. Docker’s philosophy is to provide ephemeral containers, but ephemeral does not work well for data – we do not want our data to disappear.

So, the first pattern is to create data inside a docker container. This …