The other day at PSCE I worked on a customer case of what turned out to be a problem with poor data locality or a data fragmentation problem if you will. I tought that it would make a good article as it was a great demonstration of how badly it can affect MySQL performance. And while the post is mostly around MyISAM tables, the problem is not really specific to any particular storage engine, it can affect a database that runs on InnoDB in a very similar way.
Read MoreThere are probably thousands of articles on the Internet about disk statistics in Linux, what various columns mean, how accurate the information is, and so on. I decided to attack the problem from a little bit more practical side. Hopefully this will be just the first of many future posts on identifying various I/O related performance problems on a MySQL server.
Read More