The Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo is going to be awesome! Great speakers, an A-list of sponsors, countless opportunities to engage with the community, and an enthusiastic crowd of MySQL users ensure this is going to be a great event. The conference features 72 breakout sessions, keynotes by leading industry luminaries, an optional day of 16 tutorial sessions, a bustling exhibit hall, and numerous opportunities to connect with other community members.

I am pleased to announce the conference Birds of a Feather sessions and Lightning Talks. Birds of a Feather sessions will be Tuesday and Wednesday nights following the evening receptions. Lightning Talks will be …

If you are terrified by the stability of the results in MySQL in my previous post, I am going to show what we can get with Percona Server. This is also to address the results presented there Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4

The initial benchmark is described in Benchmarks of Intel 320 SSD 600GB, and the result for MySQL 5.5.20 in case with 4 (46GB of data) and 16 tables (184GB of data) you can see in my experiments with R graphics.

How do we solve it in Percona Server ? There is whole set of improvement we made, like: …

I have a chance to test a system with Intel 320 SSD drives (NewRelic provided me with an access to the server), and compare performance with SAS hard drives.

System specification

• Dell PowerEdge R610
• Memory: 48GB
• CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650
• RAID controller: Perc H800
• RAID configuration: RAID 5 over 11 disks + 1 hot spare. RAID 5 is chosen for space purposes. In this configuration using 600GB disk, we can get 5.5T of useful space
• Intel drives: Intel 320 SSD 600GB
• HDD drives: Seagate Cheetah 15K 600GB 16MB Cache SAS
• Filesystem: XFS, mkfs.xfs -s size=4096, mount -o nobarrier

Benchmark:
For the benchmark I took a sysbench uniform oltp rw workload. 256 tables, 50mil rows each, which gives in total 3T of data.
To vary a ratio memory/data I will vary an …

Preparing Choosing Storage Systems for MySQL talk for Percona Live in Washington,DC I ran into great paper called Sane SAN 2010 by James Morle from Scale Abilities – and Oracle consulting company. It is worth to read for variety of reason yet for this post I wanted to mention what James calls “Busy” Oracle database application when it comes to IO consumption:

It is applications either using Over 10.000 IOs Per second (latency sensitive) or using Over 500MB/s bandwidth (bandwidth sensitive). I wonder how many of MySQL Users are running applications of these scale, for single …

As I mentioned in previous post on Virident FlashMAX MLC, beside sysbench benchmark, I also run tpcc-mysql (to compare performance Virident FlashMAX vs Fusion-io ioDrive Duo)

The report with results is there: http://www.percona.com/files/white-papers/virident-mlc-tpcc.pdf

The graphical result for tpcc-mysql 5000W:

My conclusions from this benchmark:

• Virident FlashMAX provides stability of performance and reveals a denser throughput.
• In addition to stability, in many cases there is also a better throughput in MySQL (up to 40\%) using the Virident …

As MLC-based SSD cards are raising popularity, there is also a raising concern how long it can survive. As we know, a MLC NAND module can handle 5,000-10,000 erasing cycles, after which it gets unusable. And obviously the SSD card based on MLC NAND has a limited lifetime. There is a lot of misconceptions and misunderstanding on how long such card can last, so I want to show some calculation to shed a light on this question.

For base I will take Virident FlashMAX M1400 (1.4TB) card. Virident guarantees 15PB (PB as in petabytes) of writes on this card.
15PB sounds impressive, but how many years it corresponds to ? Of course it depends on your workload, and mainly how write intensive it is. But there are some facts that can help you to estimate.

On Linux you can look into the /proc/diskstats file, which shows something like:

 251       0 vgca0 30273954 0 968968610 …

I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND.
I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so.

At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC card to assess how it handles MySQL workload. As I am very satisfied with the results, I wish to share my findings in this post.

But first, I wish to offer an overview of the card.

Virident FlashMax Cards are …

I’ve been working with Clustrix team for long time on the evaluation of Clustrix product, and this is the report on performance characteristics of Clustrix under tpcc-mysql workload.

I tested tpcc 5000W (~500GB of data in InnoDB) on Clustrix systems with 3, 6, 9-nodes and also, to have base for comparison, ran the same workload on HP ProLiant DL380 G6 powered by Fusion-io card, and on SuperMicro server powered by 7 Intel SSD 320 cards (this server is equal to hardware that Clustrix uses for its nodes).

The full report is available on our page with whitepapers, and in this post I would like to highlight the most interesting points.

The chart with comparison of all systems ( results in throughput per 10 sec, more is …

I wrote about Intel 320 SSD write performance before, but I was not satisfied with these results.

Somewhat each time on Intel 320 SSD I was getting different write performance, so it made me looking into this with details.

So let’s run experiment as in previous post, this is sysbench fileio random write on different file size, from 10GiB to 140GiB with 10GiB step. I use ext4 filesystem, and I perform filesystem format before increasing filesize.

The results are pretty much as in previous post, the throughput drops as we increase filesize:

However, there is when interesting stuff begin. Now when we run the same iterations again, the result will look like:

…

Our latest MySQL white paper is Improving Percona Server performance with Flashcache on the Virident tachIOn Drive. (Virident funded the research, but as always, we wrote the report ourselves.)

The conclusion is that Flashcache can be good for read-heavy workloads, but more research is needed to understand its performance characteristics on write-heavy workloads. We explain the details of exactly how good and under what circumstances. We also developed some guidelines for sizing and pricing, to serve as advice for those interested in deploying Flashcache as a way of getting some of the benefit of flash without all of the cost, or the size limitations.