Author Archives: Axel Schwenke

MyISAM and KPTI – Performance Implications From The Meltdown Fix

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 4 Comments on MyISAM and KPTI – Performance Implications From The Meltdown Fix

Recently we had a report from a user who had seen a stunning 90% performance regression after upgrading his server to a Linux kernel with KPTI (kernel page-table isolation – a remedy for the Meltdown vulnerability). (more…) Read more

MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 11 Comments on MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware

When you have read my previous blog post about MariaDB 10.1 GA performance, you have probably wondered why I didn’t include any numbers for MySQL 5.7. There are two reasons: first MySQL wasn’t GA at that time and secondly MySQL is not running stable on Power8.

Today I will come up with a comparison benchmark. I have chosen some more down-to-earth hardware for that because that is what the majority of our users will be running. Specifically it’s a SP-64 cloud machine from OVH. It has a 4-core Intel CPU and 64G of RAM. Disks aren’t fancy, but the benchmark is again a simplified read-only OLTP workload that runs from memory. Read more

MariaDB 10.1 can do 1 million queries per second

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 5 Comments on MariaDB 10.1 can do 1 million queries per second

MariaDB 10.1 not only contains tons of new features, it has also been polished to deliver top performance. The biggest improvement has been achieved for scalability on massively multithreaded hardware.
(more…) Read more

Using Lua-enabled sysbench

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 2 Comments on Using Lua-enabled sysbench

A quite common benchmark for MySQL is sysbench. It was written nearly 10 years ago by Alexey Kopytov.

Sysbench has modes to benchmark raw CPU performance, mutex speed, scheduler overhead and file IO performance. The probably most often used sysbench mode is OLTP. This benchmark mimics a OLTP scenario with small transactions hitting an optimized database. There are many variables to play with, most important is the number of simulated application threads (option –num-threads). The OLTP benchmark can be run read-only, then it does 14 SELECT queries per transaction. Or it can be run read-write which adds 2 UPDATEs and one INSERT and DELETE. Read more

MariaDB Introduces Atomic Writes

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 7 Comments on MariaDB Introduces Atomic Writes
Sysbench OLTP, transactions per second

When dealing with high performance, low latency storage devices, such as SSD cards, one finds bottlenecks in new places. This is a story about such a bottle neck and how to work around it. (more…) Read more

Sysbench OLTP: MySQL-5.6 vs. MariaDB-10.0

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 9 Comments on Sysbench OLTP: MySQL-5.6 vs. MariaDB-10.0

Oracle has now launched MySQL-5.6.10-GA, so it is time to come up with some new benchmark results. The test candidates in this benchmark run are

  • MySQL-5.5.29
  • MySQL-5.6.10
  • MariaDB-5.5.28a
  • MariaDB-10.0.1

The 5.5 versions are in because I wanted to check for any regressions. In the past we have often seen performance regressions in newer versions which were caused by new features.

This time the benchmark was run on a different box. The main difference is that this box does not have SSD but a high performance RAID-5 with 512M of battery-backed cache. Read more

How To Tune MariaDB Write Performance

Written by Written by Axel Schwenke 3 Comments on How To Tune MariaDB Write Performance

This article describes how I tuned MariaDB to give the best write throughput with SSD based storage.

When you have a write-heavy application writing into InnoDB, you will probably experience the InnoDB Checkpoint Blues. The effect manifests as stalls – short periods of time where the troughput falls to zero and I/O activity goes crazy. The phenomenon is well known and described i.e. here. More background about checkpointing can be found here.

The XtraDB fork of the InnoDB engine (and heart of Percona Server) contains some patches with the goal to overcome this odd behavior. Read more