In the 5.6.4 release it is now possible to create an InnoDB database with 4k or 8k page sizes in addition to the original 16k page size. Previously, it could be done by recompiling the engine with a different value for UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT and UNIV_PAGE_SIZE. With this release, you can set –innodb-page-size=n when starting mysqld, or put innodb_page_size=n in the configuration file in the [mysqld] section where n can be 4k, 8k, 16k, or 4096, 8192, 16384.

The support of smaller page sizes may be useful for certain storage media such as SSDs. Performance results can vary depending on your data schema, record size, and read/write ratio. But this provides you more options to optimize your performance.

When this new setting is used, the page size is set for all tablespaces used by that InnoDB instance. You can query the current value with;

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘innodb_page_size’;
or
SELECT variable_value …

While setting up MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.2 (Merlin) on a system which had been running version 2.1 I thought I’d try and see what difference the change from using normal innodb tables to using the compressed table format available in the innodb plugin.

I’ve been using a separate db backend for merlin because for me it’s easier to manage and also the database backend has been put on a dedicated server. I’ve also been trying the innodb_plugin on another busier server as I had performance problems with the normal 5.1.42 built-in innodb engine which the plugin managed to solve.

So given that I was using a separate db server I upgraded it to 5.1.47, configured the server to use the plugin (1.0.8) rather than to use the built-in innodb engine and then decided to …