When users experience memory usage issues with any software, including MySQL®, their first response is to think that it’s a symptom of a memory leak. As this story will show, this is not always the case.

This story is about a bug.

All Percona Support customers are eligible for bug fixes, but their options vary. For example, Advanced+ customers are offered a HotFix build prior to the public release of software with the patch. Premium customers do not even have to use Percona software: we may port our patches to upstream for them. But for Percona products all Support levels have the right to have a fix.

Even so, this does not mean we will fix every unexpected behavior, even if we accept that behavior to be a valid bug. One of the reasons …

In this post we will review the most important Linux settings to adjust for performance tuning and optimization of a MySQL database server. We’ll note how some of the Linux parameter settings used OS tuning may vary according to different system types: physical, virtual or cloud. Other posts have addressed MySQL parameters, like Alexander’s blog MySQL 5.7 Performance Tuning Immediately After Installation. That post remains highly relevant for the latest versions of MySQL, 5.7 and 8.0. Here we will focus more on the Linux operating system parameters that can affect database performance.

Server and Operating System

Here are some Linux parameters that you should check and consider modifying if you need to improve database performance.

…

Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario?

Let me share a conclusion first: If you have a server with more than 8 cores you should use something different than the default glibc memory allocator.
We recommend jemalloc or tcmalloc.

In my test I will use Dell R720 box(spec), Centos 6.3, upcoming Percona Server 5.5.30 and 3 allocators – stock glibc 2.13, jemalloc-3.1.0, the latest tcmalloc from svn repo. …