I had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database. It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started looking quite odd.
Read MoreIn one of my previous posts, "How to resize InnoDB logs?", I gave the advice on how to safely change the size of transaction logs. This time, I will explain why doing it may become necessary.
Read MoreMySQL performance is largely defined by keys and how efficiently queries can use them. As you scale, at certain point it isn't enough anymore to just have any indexes and still get a good performance in return. You have to really figure them out and allow your queries to do less work, as little work as possible. The approach presented in this article can sometimes help designing such good, efficient indexes. As a consultant, I have to rely on it myself from time to time, having to optimize a query that works in a database I know nothing about.
Read MoreHow important a primary key design can be for MySQL performance? The answer is: Extremely! If tables use InnoDB storage engine, that is.
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