Ahh seems like a few people do take the time to read my blog:) Peter Z Commented here on my common disk performance mistakes post. He makes some great arguments, and you may want to give it a read. While he does not agree with everything I say it is interesting to see his views. Remember different folks have different experiences and a lot of times there are multiple roads on the path the performance nirvana.

Let me start off saying I wholly admit that saying “everything” is a disk issue is a dramatic exaggeration. And i did not specifically say disk, I said “The problem is always an IO problem”, more on that later. I have run into my far share of issues outside of this sphere ( network, context switching, cpu ), but I still find disk performance to be by far the most common issue effecting systems I deal with. In my …

Have you ever heard the one about throwing hardware at a software problem? In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned something along the lines of?well I’ll just cut and paste . . . In my experience, the solution to most problems (the ones the caller refers to as “it’s running slow”) are not rooted in [...]

I’ve been working with the folks working on OpenSolaris for a few months now providing advice and input on getting MySQL and the connectors (C/ODBC and C/J) installed as a standard component. Having got the basics in, the team are now looking at adding both 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

The question raised at the end of last week was whether OpenSolaris should enable 64-bit builds by default in 64-bit installations, and whether there was a noticeable performance difference that would make this worthwhile.

I did some initial tests on Friday which showed that there was a small increase (10-15%) of the packaged 64-bit installations over 32-bit under x86 using snv_81. Tests were executed using the included sql-bench tool, and this was a single execution run of each package for 5.0.56. Transactions are missing because I hadn’t enabled transactions in the tests.

and doesn’t seem to take it too nicely :-(

I decided to install the mysql beta on my laptop (Mac Intel @2G ram and 2GHZdual core) and my sunfire (@8G ram and 16 1GHZ Ultrasparcs).

(I have it installed on a x86-64 box as well, but that machine is busy at the moment)..

so for a quick sanity check I ran mysqlslap to see how it performs.

I chose to simulate a 20 concurrent users

sunfire$ mysqlslap -psunfire -c 20 -i 20
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.714 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.941 seconds
        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 2.539 seconds
        Number of clients running queries: 20
        Average number of queries per client: 0

vs

laptop$ mysqlslap -i 20 -c 20
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.201 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.072 …

Here’s a great thing for those who need to work with multiple platforms, VMware today announced that they are dropping VMware Server GSX and replacing it with the free (as in beer) VMware Server.

A press release on the change can be found at http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/server_beta.html

A product page for VMware Server is available at http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

VMware Server is the second offering from VMware, the first being VMware Player.

As with VMware Player, VMware Server is available for Windows and Linux host machines, with VMware Server able to run able to operate on one machine and be managed from another.

While the VMware Server is a bit of overkill for …

In order to better document MySQL on Mac, I have recently acquired a Mac Mini. This brings my collection of desktop machines to three:

The black machine is a Windows box, the white machine runs Linux, and now a Mac Mini.

The new addition closer up:

This is the first Mac I have had regular use of, so I am sure I have some learning to do. For now I just need to get MySQL and the GUI tools installed, then find where they hide the command-line.