In this blog, we’ll examine how CPU governor performance affects MySQL.

It’s been a while since we looked into CPU governors and with the new Intel CPUs and new Linux distros, I wanted to check how CPU governors affect MySQL performance.

Before jumping to results, let’s review what drivers manage CPU frequency. Traditionally, the default driver was “acpi-cpufreq”, but for the recent Intel CPUs and new Linux kernel it was changed to “intel_pstate”.

To check what driver is being used, run the command

cpupower frequency-info

 .

cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: acpi-cpufreq
CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
hardware limits: 1.20 GHz - 2.00 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 2.00 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 1.60 GHz, 1.50 GHz, 1.40 GHz, …