Recently we published the first part of research comparing Graviton (ARM) with AMD and Intel CPU on AWS. In the first part, we selected general-purpose EC2 instances with the same configurations (amount of vCPU).  The main goal was to see the trend and make a general comparison of CPU types on the AWS platform only for MySQL. We didn’t set the goal to compare the performance of different CPU types. Our expertise is in MySQL performance tuning. We share research “as is” with all scripts, and anyone interested could rerun and reproduce it.
All scripts, raw logs and additional plots are available on GitHub: (2021_10_arm_cpu_comparison_c5,  …

Recently, AWS presented its own CPU on ARM architecture for server solutions.

It was Graviton. As a result, they update some lines of their EC2 instances with new postfix “g” (e.g. m6g.small, r5g.nano, etc.). In their review and presentation, AWS showed impressive results that it is faster in some benchmarks up to 20 percent. On the other hand, some reviewers said that Graviton does not show any significant results and, in some cases, showed fewer performance results than Intel.

We decided to investigate it and do our research regarding Graviton performance, comparing it with other CPUs (Intel and AMD) directly for MySQL.

Disclaimer

1. The test is designed to be CPU bound only, so we will use a read-only test and make sure there is no I/O activity during the test.
2. Tests were run  on m5.* (Intel) , m5a.* (AMD),  m6g.*(Graviton) EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region. (List of EC2 see …

Recently, Dimitri published the results of measuring MySQL 8.0 on Intel Optane storage device. In this blog post, I wanted to look at this in more detail and explore the performance of MySQL 8, MySQL 5.7 and Percona Server for MySQL using a similar set up. The Intel Optane is a very capable device, so I was puzzled that Dimitri chose MySQL options that are either not safe or not recommended for production workloads.

Since we have an Intel Optane in our labs, I wanted to run a similar benchmark, but using settings that we would recommend our customers to use, namely:

• use innodb_checksum
• use innodb_doublewrite
• use binary logs with sync_binlog=1
• enable (by default) Performance …

In this blog post, we’ll look at the performance hit from the Spectre bug fix on Ubuntu.

Recently we measured the performance penalty from the Meltdown fix on Ubuntu servers. It turned out to be negligible.

Today, Ubuntu made a Spectre bug fix on Ubuntu available, shipped in kernel 4.4.0-112. As with the Meltdown fix, we measured the effect of this update. Unfortunately, we observed a major performance penalty on MySQL workloads with this new kernel.

Our benchmark used the following:

System:

• CPU:
  • 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz (Codename Haswell)
  • /proc/cpuinfo has 48 …

In this blog post, we examine the recent revelations about CPU security vulnerabilities.

The beginning of the new year also brings to light fresh and new CPU security vulnerabilities. Today’s big offenders originate on the hardware side – more specifically, the CPU. The reported hardware kernel bugs allow for direct access to data held in the computer/server’s memory, which in turn might leak sensitive data. Some of the most popular CPUs affected by these bugs are Intel, AMD and ARM.

The most important thing to know is that this vulnerability is not exploitable remotely, and requires that someone execute the malicious code locally. However, take extra precaution when running in virtualized environments (see below for more information).

A full overview (including a technical, in-depth …

We’re moving along on the first day at Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016, and I was able to attend a lecture from Intel’s Ken LeTourneau on Performance of Percona Server for MySQL on Intel Server Systems using HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe SSD as Different Storage Mediums. In this talk, Ken reviewed some benchmark testing he did using MySQL on various types of storage mediums. This talk looked at the performance of Percona Server for MySQL for Linux running on the same Intel system, but with three different storage configurations. We looked at and compared the performance of:

1. a RAID of HDD
2. a RAID of SATA SSD
3. a RAID of NVMe SSD

In the talk,  Ken covered the hardware and system …

Introduction
In my last blog post, Internet of Things, Messaging and MySQL, I have showed how to start your own Internet of Things with Particle Photon board. That implementation is great, but requires constant internet (wi-fi) access as the Particle Photon board does not have any local storage. If you do not have a reliable network access (i.e. in some remote places) or need something really small to store your data you can now use Intel Edison. I’ve even install MySQL on Edison, which makes it the smallest (in size) MySQL server in the world! Other options include:

• Raspberry Pi (my colleague Roel installed …

The other day a customer asked me to do capacity planning for their web server farm. I was looking at the CPU graph for one of the web servers that had Hyper-threading switched ON and thought to myself: “This must be quite a misleading graph – it shows 30% CPU usage. It can’t really be that this server can handle 3 times more work?”

Or can it?

I decided to do what we usually do in such case – I decided to test it and find out the truth. Turns out – there’s more to it than meets the eye.

How Intel Hyper-Threading works

Before we get to my benchmark results, let’s talk a little bit about hyper-threading. According to Intel, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more …

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance …

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