Top all-time · #533
Percona
Company blog · mysqlperformanceblog.comdataprogramming
Percona is the company blog at mysqlperformanceblog.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2007, 110 different Hacker News readers have linked it 301 times, most often “Percona's MySQL Performance Blog is down”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Discover insights from Percona experts on MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and open source database management. Access database performance tips, best practices, and tutorials.
Most-linked posts?
- Percona's MySQL Performance Blog is down5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-08-03
- What to tune in MySQL Server after installation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-04-02
- MySQL: KISS KISS KISS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-03-01
- Death match EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-02-21
- Percona MySQL distribution now includes HandlerSocket2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-16
- /2012/03/27/innodbs-gap-locks/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-07
- Is VoltDB really as scalable as they claim?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-01
- MySQL: Recovering Innodb table Corruption2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-07-04
- Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-01-13
- Video: The InnoDB Storage Engine for MySQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-18
What Hacker News says?
I use the cheapest and the best tool available: EXPLAIN EXTENDED You cannot do any better than have the DB tell you exactly what it is going to do with your query. Then you can experiment with changing / adding / removing clauses and see how it would affect the query plan produced by EXPLAIN. For example if EXPLAIN says the query would generate a temp table you could often achieve improvement by managing the same te…
Comment linking /2010/06/15/explain-extended-can-tell-you-all-kinds-of-interesting-things/
on “"I've isolated the bug to a database query"”Submitted Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing as a story · 86 points
HN discussionThe latest Percona flavor of MySQL has it built in http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/12/14/percona-serve...
Comment linking /2010/12/14/percona-server-now-both-sql-and-nosql/
on “Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak comparison”Submitted OOM relation to vm.swappiness=0 in new kernel as a story · 53 points
HN discussionI limit my subs to mostly tech and feeds that post infrequently but well. I go back and forth between enabling Hacker News and disabling it. It's too busy and distracting sometimes when I need to get things done and I don't want to get lost it some lengthy article somewhere. Here are my current feeds sans HN http://abstrusegoose.com http://xkcd.com/ http://cmurphycode.posterous.com http://acmel.wordpress.com http://…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Apart from Hacker News, what else you read?”Submitted Tokyo Tyrant: Is it Durable? as a story · 49 points
HN discussionXtraDB is not only the default in Percona, they originally wrote it (forked from InnoDB). http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/12/16/announcing-pe...
Comment linking /2008/12/16/announcing-percona-xtradb-storage-engine-a-drop-in-replacement-for-standard-innodb/
on “Arch Linux: MariaDB replaces MySQL in repositories”Submitted SSL Performance Overhead in MySQL as a story · 48 points
HN discussionAs with regular drives, it depends on the device. Early Intel SSDs were known to be particularly prone to this issue: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/02/ssd-xfs-lvm-f... http://www.evanjones.ca/intel-ssd-durability.html
Comment linking /2009/03/02/ssd-xfs-lvm-fsync-write-cache-barrier-and-lost-transactions/
on “Experiment in booting Linux fast”Submitted MySQL server memory usage troubleshooting tips as a story · 35 points
HN discussionWith MySQL (and Oracle before that) it was common to simply move different parts of the database data files to different disks. I don't use Mongo so I can't speak to that, but the concept works pretty much universally. See here for more information about spreading your database around multiple disks: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/12/25/spreading-ibd...
Comment linking /2010/12/25/spreading-ibd-files-across-multiple-disks-the-optimization-that-isnt/
on “New High I/O EC2 Instance Type - hi1.4xlarge - 2 TB of SSD-Backed Storage”Submitted MongoDB approach to database synchronization as a story · 29 points
HN discussionI love my consumer SSD backed database, but don't get visions of 380,000 IOPS on a real workload quite yet. Like any radical performance increase on just one component it's more likely to just reveal a non-disk latency bottleneck somewhere else in your system. Be aware that the performance characteristics of flash are very unlike spinning disks, and vary widely between models. You will see things like weird stalls,…
Comment linking /2012/04/25/testing-samsung-ssd-sata-256gb-830-not-all-ssd-created-equal/
on “Switch Your Databases To Flash Storage”Submitted High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL as a story · 26 points
HN discussionOr preferably, Sphinx support. From the announcement I can't see that you can't do it, but not that you can. InnoDB and MyISAM are not good at full text search even on local disk, no reason to make that worse. Somewhat kinda germane post from Percona: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/09/10/what-to-do-wi...
Comment linking /2009/09/10/what-to-do-with-mysql-full-text-search-while-migrating-to-innodb/
on “Google Cloud SQL: your database in the cloud”Submitted Caching could be the last thing you want to do as a story · 25 points
HN discussionPercona Server has lots of improvements (some small things and others that are pretty essential for me) On the SSD front, the main ones are: * You can put the innodb doublewrite buffer on your spinning disks - that's the best place for it since it's heavy sequential writes. See section 2.2.2 here http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2009/05/tables-on-ssd... * The ability to tune various parts of innodb that were o…
Comment linking /2012/02/23/percona-server-vs-mysql-on-intel-320-ssd/
on “RIP Open Source MySQL”Submitted Percona XtraDB Cluster: Setting up a simple cluster as a story · 19 points
HN discussionFWIW, in addition to MariaDB, there is Percona Server as well, and they are also maintaining a launchpad for the base MySQL code on Launchpad while Oracle neglects that codebase. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/08/16/where-to-get-...
Comment linking /2012/08/16/where-to-get-a-bzr-tree-of-the-latest-mysql-releases/
on “RIP Open Source MySQL”Submitted Speeding up GROUP BY if you want aproximate results as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI'm not familiar with scaling Java, but I've worked with the language itself on Android. What makes it so great for scalability as opposed to something like Ruby? If you are using Rails, the database is the problem 99% of the time, not Ruby. MySQL can easily* be scaled / denormalised / sharded then if you need to you can just horizontally scale your app servers. (*As easy as MySQL can. It isn't a black magic though,…
Comment linking /
on “Hate Java? Maybe you should hate the industries stuck in the 50's.”Submitted A closer look at Percona Server 5.6 as a story · 14 points
HN discussionYou mean InnoDB's gap locks? http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/03/27/innodbs-gap-l... http://pooteeweet.org/blog/745 If you actually have that problem in production, it is because you are spreading the writes out to all of your Galera servers and simultaneously doing conflicting updates/transactions. I'm uncertain what exactly you expect any database to do in this situation? Silently discard one?
Comment linking /2012/03/27/innodbs-gap-locks/
on “Bucardo 5, async replication for PostgreSQL with true multi-master”Submitted RAID vs SSD vs FusionIO as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThe concept of variance reduction is not even new with computing - In manufacturing they have six sigma. I believe the famous GE CEO's quote was "Our Customers Feel the Variance, Not the Mean" (Google it). This is talked about here: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/07/performance-o...
Comment linking /2010/06/07/performance-optimization-and-six-sigma/
on “MySQL at Facebook”Submitted Death match EBS versus SSD price, performance, and QoS as a story · 11 points
HN discussionBeware of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK potentially causing an exclusive lock. The percona guys give an explanation: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/04/24/how-fast-is-f...
Comment linking /2010/04/24/how-fast-is-flush-tables-with-read-lock/
on “Dammit, MySQL”Submitted Linux performance tuning tips for MySQL as a story · 9 points
HN discussionNote that unless your mysql server has more than 4 (physical) cores, you aren't going to see any performance improvements from any variation/fork of mysql. 8 cores is where things start to diverge under load. This website has some benchmarks to prove it: http://vbtechsupport.com/606/ http://vbtechsupport.com/657/2/ Also http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4... But there are other reasons to lo…
Comment linking /2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4-benchmarks/
on “Wikipedia (English) starting to migrate to MariaDB”Submitted MyISAM vs. innoDB, Peter Zaitsev as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
