Improved MariaDB performance using Shannon Systems PCIe and atomic writes

We recently had a chance to test how the Shannon Direct-IO PCIe Flash G3i devices improves the performance of MariaDB. Anybody who cares about I/O performance has noticed that PCIe drives have become readily available in recent years and that they are significantly faster than normal SSD drives connected to the traditional SATA port (not to mention hard disk drives). In addition to being great hardware, the Shannon drives offer an extra boost by having a device driver that supports atomic writes. This means the device guarantees that a write made to it reaches the drive, and thus the MariaDB server does not have to run extra checks like it does on normal hardware.

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…)

A few interesting findings on MariaDB and MySQL scalability, multi-table OLTP RO

t’s been almost a year since I benchmarked MariaDB and MySQL on our good old 4 CPU / 32 Cores / 64 Threads Sandy Bridge server. There seem to be a few interesting things happened since that time.

  • MySQL 5.6.23 peak throughput dropped by ~8% compared to 5.6.14. Looks like this regression appeared in MySQL 5.6.21.
  • 10.0.18 (git snapshot) peak threads increased by ~20% compared to 10.0.9 and reached parity with 5.6.23 (not with 5.6.20 though).
  • 10.1.4 (git snapshot) and 5.7.5 are the champions (though 10.1.4 was usually 1-5% faster). Both have similar peaks @ 64 threads.