Category: Performance
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ARM improvements in 2020
2020 has seen quite a few developments with the ARM architecture. For MariaDB things are no different. First we have expanded our testing infrastructure to cover more Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RedHat) on ARM and we are now building packages for all of them. The next MariaDB release will include additional binary tarballs for ARM distributions, in addition to the already existing RPM and DEB packages.
All this could not be accomplished without the help of Huawei, who […]
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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 […]
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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).
A big deal of those 90% was caused by running in an old version of VMware which doesn’t pass the PCID and INVPCID capabilities of the CPU to the guest. But I could reproduce a regression around 40% even on bare metal.
This is […]
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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 […]
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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. The following numbers show the throughput for a simplified sysbench OLTP benchmark on MariaDB-10.1.8 compared to MariaDB-10.0.21:
Benchmark Details
The benchmark is sysbench-mariadb (sysbench trunk with a fix for a more scalable random number generator) OLTP simplified to do 1000 point selects per transaction. The data set is 1 million […]
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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. They seem to be pushing this system limits, since both have capacity to scale more.
- 5.7.6 has serious (~50%) scalability regression compared to 5.7.5. There is heavy LOCK_plugin mutex contention, which seem to be caused by query rewrite plugin framework. I couldn’t find way to disable it. Hope this will be fixed in coming releases.
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A few interesting findings on MariaDB and MySQL scalability, multi-table OLTP RO
It’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. They seem to be pushing this system limits, since both have capacity to scale more.
- 5.7.6 has serious (~50%) scalability regression compared to 5.7.5. There is heavy LOCK_plugin mutex contention, which seem to be caused by query rewrite plugin framework. I couldn’t find way to disable it. Hope this will be fixed in coming releases.
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Performance evaluation of MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7.4-labs-tplc
Introduction
Evaluating the performance of database systems is a very demanding task. There are a lot of hard choices to be made, e.g.:
- What operating system and operating system version is to be used
- What configuration setup is to be used
- What benchmarks are to be used and how long are the warm-up and measure times
- What test setups are to be used
- What version of the database management system is used
- What storage engine is used