When building network libraries for Node.js, as we do at work, one quite quickly comes by Node's Buffer type. A Buffer gives access to a memory region in a quite raw form, allowing to handle raw data and allowing to interpret binary streams. The Buffer interface predates ES6 TypedArrays and has some optimizations.

Two optimisations are notable:

For one the slice() method does not copy data, but returns a view on the underlying data. This makes it quite efficient to work on a window of the data, but when writing one has to be careful. Simple example:

const buffer = Buffer.from("hello"); …

In this blog post, I’ll discuss how to use the InnoDB buffer pool pre-load feature in MySQL 5.7

Starting MySQL 5.6, you can configure MySQL to save the contents of your InnoDB buffer pool and load it on startup. Starting in MySQL 5.7, this is the default behavior. Without any special effort, MySQL saves and restores a portion of buffer pool in the default configuration. We made a similar feature available in Percona Server 5.5 – so the concept has been around for quite a while.

Frankly, time has reduced the need for this feature. Five years ago, we would typically store databases on spinning disks. These disks often took quite a long time to warm up with normal database workloads, which could lead to …