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13 Getting Maximum Performance from MySQL

Optimization is a complicated task because it ultimately requires understanding of the whole system. While it may be possible to do some local optimizations with small knowledge of your system/application, the more optimal you want your system to become the more you will have to know about it.

So this chapter will try to explain and give some examples of different ways to optimize MySQL. But remember that there are always some (increasingly harder) additional ways to make the system even faster.

13.1 Optimization Overview

The most important part for getting a system fast is of course the basic design. You also need to know what kinds of things your system will be doing, and what your bottlenecks are.

The most common bottlenecks are:

13.2 System/Compile Time and Startup Parameter Tuning

We start with the system level things since some of these decisions have to be made very early. In other cases a fast look at this part may suffice because it not that important for the big gains. However, it is always nice to have a feeling about how much one could gain by changing things at this level.

The default OS to use is really important! To get the most use of multiple CPU machines one should use Solaris (because the threads works really nice) or Linux (because the 2.2 kernel has really good SMP support). Also on 32-bit machines Linux has a 2G file size limit by default. Hopefully this will be fixed soon when new filesystems are released (XFS/Reiserfs). If you have a desperate need for files bigger than 2G on Linux-intel 32 bit, you should get the LFS patch for the ext2 file system.

Because we have not run MySQL in production on that many platforms, we advice you to test your intended platform before choosing it, if possible.

Other tips:

13.2.1 How Compiling and Linking Affects the Speed of MySQL

Most of the following tests are done on Linux with the MySQL benchmarks, but they should give some indication for other operating systems and workloads.

You get the fastest executable when you link with -static.

On Linux, you will get the fastest code when compiling with pgcc and -O3. To compile `sql_yacc.cc' with these options, you need about 200M memory because gcc/pgcc needs a lot of memory to make all functions inline. You should also set CXX=gcc when configuring MySQL to avoid inclusion of the libstdc++ library (it is not needed). Note that with some versions of pgcc, the resulting code will only run on true Pentium processors, even if you use the compiler option that you want the resulting code to be working on all x586 type processors (like AMD).

By just using a better compiler and/or better compiler options you can get a 10-30 % speed increase in your application. This is particularly important if you compile the SQL server yourself!

We have tested both the Cygnus CodeFusion and Fujitsu compilers, but when we tested them, neither was sufficiently bug free to allow MySQL to be compiled with optimizations on.

When you compile MySQL you should only include support for the character sets that you are going to use. (Option --with-charset=xxx). The standard MySQL binary distributions are compiled with support for all character sets.

Here is a list of some measurements that we have done:

The MySQL-Linux distribution provided by MySQL AB used to be compiled with pgcc, but we had to go back to regular gcc because of a bug in pgcc that would generate the code that does not run on AMD. We will continue using gcc until that bug is resolved. In the meantime, if you have a non-AMD machine, you can get a faster binary by compiling with pgcc. The standard MySQL Linux binary is linked statically to get it faster and more portable.

13.2.2 Disk Issues

13.2.3 Using Symbolic Links

You can move tables and databases from the database directory to other locations and replace them with symbolic links to the new locations. You might want to do this, for example, to move a database to a file system with more free space or increase the speed of your system by spreading your tables to different disk.

The recommended may to do this, is to just symlink databases to different disk and only symlink tables as a last resort. .

13.2.3.1 Using Symbolic Links for Databases

The way to symlink a database is to first create a directory on some disk where you have free space and then create a symlink to it from the MySQL database directory. 

shell> mkdir /dr1/databases/test
shell> ln -s /dr1/databases/test mysqld-datadir

MySQL doesn't support that you link one directory to multiple databases. Replacing a database directory with a symbolic link will work fine as long as you don't make a symbolic link between databases. Suppose you have a database db1 under the MySQL data directory, and then make a symlink db2 that points to db1: 

shell> cd /path/to/datadir
shell> ln -s db1 db2

Now, for any table tbl_a in db1, there also appears to be a table tbl_a in db2. If one thread updates db1.tbl_a and another thread updates db2.tbl_a, there will be problems.

If you really need this, you must change the following code in `mysys/mf_format.c': 

if (flag & 32 || (!lstat(to,&stat_buff) && S_ISLNK(stat_buff.st_mode)))

to 

if (1)

On Windows you can use internal symbolic links to directories by compiling MySQL with -DUSE_SYMDIR. This allows you to put different databases on different disks. See section 4.13.6 Splitting Data Across Different Disks on Windows.

13.2.3.2 Using Symbolic Links for Tables

Before MySQL 4.0 you should not symlink tables, if you are not very carefully with them. The problem is that if you run ALTER TABLE, REPAIR TABLE or OPTIMIZE TABLE on a symlinked table, the symlinks will be removed and replaced by the original files. This happens because the above command works by creating a temporary file in the database directory and when the command is complete, replace the original file with the temporary file.

You should not symlink tables on system that doesn't have a fully working realpath() call. (At least Linux and Solaris support realpath())

In MySQL 4.0 symlinks is only fully supported for MyISAM tables. For other table types you will probably get strange problems when doing any of the above mentioned commands.

The handling of symbolic links in MySQL 4.0 works the following way (this is mostly relevant only for MyISAM tables).

Things that are not yet supported:

13.2.4 Tuning Server Parameters

You can get the default buffer sizes used by the mysqld server with this command: 

shell> mysqld --help

This command produces a list of all mysqld options and configurable variables. The output includes the default values and looks something like this: 

Possible variables for option --set-variable (-O) are:
back_log              current value: 5
bdb_cache_size        current value: 1048540
binlog_cache_size     current_value: 32768
connect_timeout       current value: 5
delayed_insert_timeout  current value: 300
delayed_insert_limit  current value: 100
delayed_queue_size    current value: 1000
flush_time            current value: 0
interactive_timeout   current value: 28800
join_buffer_size      current value: 131072
key_buffer_size       current value: 1048540
lower_case_table_names  current value: 0
long_query_time       current value: 10
max_allowed_packet    current value: 1048576
max_binlog_cache_size current_value: 4294967295
max_connections       current value: 100
max_connect_errors    current value: 10
max_delayed_threads   current value: 20
max_heap_table_size   current value: 16777216
max_join_size         current value: 4294967295
max_sort_length       current value: 1024
max_tmp_tables        current value: 32
max_write_lock_count  current value: 4294967295
myisam_sort_buffer_size  current value: 8388608
net_buffer_length     current value: 16384
net_retry_count       current value: 10
net_read_timeout      current value: 30
net_write_timeout     current value: 60
query_buffer_size     current value: 0
record_buffer         current value: 131072
slow_launch_time      current value: 2
sort_buffer           current value: 2097116
table_cache           current value: 64
thread_concurrency    current value: 10
tmp_table_size        current value: 1048576
thread_stack          current value: 131072
wait_timeout          current value: 28800

If there is a mysqld server currently running, you can see what values it actually is using for the variables by executing this command: 

shell> mysqladmin variables

You can find a full description for all variables in the SHOW VARIABLES section in this manual. See section 7.28.4 SHOW VARIABLES.

You can also see some statistics from a running server by issuing the command SHOW STATUS. See section 7.28.3 SHOW STATUS.

MySQL uses algorithms that are very scalable, so you can usually run with very little memory. If you, however, give MySQL more memory, you will normally also get better performance.

When tuning a MySQL server, the two most important variables to use are key_buffer_size and table_cache. You should first feel confident that you have these right before trying to change any of the other variables.

If you have much memory (>=256M) and many tables and want maximum performance with a moderate number of clients, you should use something like this: 

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=64M -O table_cache=256 \
           -O sort_buffer=4M -O record_buffer=1M &

If you have only 128M and only a few tables, but you still do a lot of sorting, you can use something like: 

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=16M -O sort_buffer=1M

If you have little memory and lots of connections, use something like this: 

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=512k -O sort_buffer=100k \
           -O record_buffer=100k &

or even: 

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=512k -O sort_buffer=16k \
           -O table_cache=32 -O record_buffer=8k -O net_buffer=1K &

When you have installed MySQL, the `support-files' directory will contain some different my.cnf example files, `my-huge.cnf', `my-large.cnf', `my-medium.cnf', and `my-small.cnf', you can use as a base to optimize your system.

If there are very many connections, ``swapping problems'' may occur unless mysqld has been configured to use very little memory for each connection. mysqld performs better if you have enough memory for all connections, of course.

Note that if you change an option to mysqld, it remains in effect only for that instance of the server.

To see the effects of a parameter change, do something like this: 

shell> mysqld -O key_buffer=32m --help

Make sure that the --help option is last; otherwise, the effect of any options listed after it on the command line will not be reflected in the output.

13.2.5 How MySQL Opens and Closes Tables

table_cache, max_connections, and max_tmp_tables affect the maximum number of files the server keeps open. If you increase one or both of these values, you may run up against a limit imposed by your operating system on the per-process number of open file descriptors. However, you can increase the limit on many systems. Consult your OS documentation to find out how to do this, because the method for changing the limit varies widely from system to system.

table_cache is related to max_connections. For example, for 200 concurrent running connections, you should have a table cache of at least 200 * n, where n is the maximum number of tables in a join.

The cache of open tables can grow to a maximum of table_cache (default 64; this can be changed with the -O table_cache=# option to mysqld). A table is never closed, except when the cache is full and another thread tries to open a table or if you use mysqladmin refresh or mysqladmin flush-tables.

When the table cache fills up, the server uses the following procedure to locate a cache entry to use:

A table is opened for each concurrent access. This means that if you have two threads accessing the same table or access the table twice in the same query (with AS) the table needs to be opened twice. The first open of any table takes two file descriptors; each additional use of the table takes only one file descriptor. The extra descriptor for the first open is used for the index file; this descriptor is shared among all threads.

You can check if your table cache is too small by checking the mysqld variable opened_tables. If this is quite big, even if you haven't done a lot of FLUSH TABLES, you should increase your table cache. See section 7.28.3 SHOW STATUS.

13.2.6 Drawbacks to Creating Large Numbers of Tables in the Same Database

If you have many files in a directory, open, close, and create operations will be slow. If you execute SELECT statements on many different tables, there will be a little overhead when the table cache is full, because for every table that has to be opened, another must be closed. You can reduce this overhead by making the table cache larger.

13.2.7 Why So Many Open tables?

When you run mysqladmin status, you'll see something like this: 

Uptime: 426 Running threads: 1 Questions: 11082 Reloads: 1 Open tables: 12

This can be somewhat perplexing if you only have 6 tables.

MySQL is multithreaded, so it may have many queries on the same table simultaneously. To minimize the problem with two threads having different states on the same file, the table is opened independently by each concurrent thread. This takes some memory and one extra file descriptor for the data file. The index file descriptor is shared between all threads.

13.2.8 How MySQL Uses Memory

The list below indicates some of the ways that the mysqld server uses memory. Where applicable, the name of the server variable relevant to the memory use is given:

ps and other system status programs may report that mysqld uses a lot of memory. This may be caused by thread-stacks on different memory addresses. For example, the Solaris version of ps counts the unused memory between stacks as used memory. You can verify this by checking available swap with swap -s. We have tested mysqld with commercial memory-leakage detectors, so there should be no memory leaks.

13.2.9 How MySQL Locks Tables

You can find a discussion about different locking methods in the appendix. See section I.4 Locking methods.

All locking in MySQL is deadlock-free. This is managed by always requesting all needed locks at once at the beginning of a query and always locking the tables in the same order.

The locking method MySQL uses for WRITE locks works as follows:

The locking method MySQL uses for READ locks works as follows:

When a lock is released, the lock is made available to the threads in the write lock queue, then to the threads in the read lock queue.

This means that if you have many updates on a table, SELECT statements will wait until there are no more updates.

To work around this for the case where you want to do many INSERT and SELECT operations on a table, you can insert rows in a temporary table and update the real table with the records from the temporary table once in a while.

This can be done with the following code: 

mysql> LOCK TABLES real_table WRITE, insert_table WRITE;
mysql> insert into real_table select * from insert_table;
mysql> TRUNCATE TABLE insert_table;
mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;

You can use the LOW_PRIORITY options with INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE or HIGH_PRIORITY with SELECT if you want to prioritize retrieval in some specific cases. You can also start mysqld with --low-priority-updates to get the same behaveour.

Using SQL_BUFFER_RESULT can also help making table locks shorter. See section 7.19 SELECT Syntax.

You could also change the locking code in `mysys/thr_lock.c' to use a single queue. In this case, write locks and read locks would have the same priority, which might help some applications.

13.2.10 Table Locking Issues

The table locking code in MySQL is deadlock free.

MySQL uses table locking (instead of row locking or column locking) on all table types, except BDB tables, to achieve a very high lock speed. For large tables, table locking is MUCH better than row locking for most applications, but there are, of course, some pitfalls.

For BDB and InnoDB tables, MySQL only uses table locking if you explicitely lock the table with LOCK TABLES or execute a command that will modify every row in the table, like ALTER TABLE. For these table types we recommend you to not use LOCK TABLES at all.

In MySQL Version 3.23.7 and above, you can insert rows into MyISAM tables at the same time other threads are reading from the table. Note that currently this only works if there are no holes after deleted rows in the table at the time the insert is made. When all holes has been filled with new data, concurrent inserts will automatically be enabled again.

Table locking enables many threads to read from a table at the same time, but if a thread wants to write to a table, it must first get exclusive access. During the update, all other threads that want to access this particular table will wait until the update is ready.

As updates on tables normally are considered to be more important than SELECT, all statements that update a table have higher priority than statements that retrieve information from a table. This should ensure that updates are not 'starved' because one issues a lot of heavy queries against a specific table. (You can change this by using LOW_PRIORITY with the statement that does the update or HIGH_PRIORITY with the SELECT statement.)

Starting from MySQL Version 3.23.7 one can use the max_write_lock_count variable to force MySQL to temporary give all SELECT statements, that wait for a table, a higher priority after a specific number of inserts on a table.

Table locking is, however, not very good under the following senario:

Some possible solutions to this problem are:

13.2.11 How MySQL uses DNS

When a new thread connects to mysqld, mysqld will span a new thread to handle the request. This thread will first check if the hostname is in the hostname cache. If not the thread will call gethostbyaddr_r() and gethostbyname_r() to resolve the hostname.

If the operating system doesn't support the above thread-safe calls, the thread will lock a mutex and call gethostbyaddr() and gethostbyname() instead. Note that in this case no other thread can resolve other hostnames that is not in the hostname cache until the first thread is ready.

You can disable DNS host lookup by starting mysqld with --skip-name-resolve. In this case you can however only use IP names in the MySQL privilege tables.

If you have a very slow DNS and many hosts, you can get more performance by either disabling DNS lookop with --skip-name-resolve or by increasing the HOST_CACHE_SIZE define (default: 128) and recompile mysqld.

You can disable the hostname cache with --skip-host-cache. You can clear the hostname cache with FLUSH HOSTS or mysqladmin flush-hosts.

If you don't want to allow connections over TCP/IP, you can do this by starting mysqld with --skip-networking.

13.3 Get Your Data as Small as Possible

One of the most basic optimization is to get your data (and indexes) to take as little space on the disk (and in memory) as possible. This can give huge improvements because disk reads are faster and normally less main memory will be used. Indexing also takes less resources if done on smaller columns.

MySQL supports a lot of different table types and row formats. Choosing the right table format may give you a big performance gain. See section 8 MySQL Table Types.

You can get better performance on a table and minimize storage space using the techniques listed below:

13.4 How MySQL Uses Indexes

Indexes are used to find rows with a specific value of one column fast. Without an index MySQL has to start with the first record and then read through the whole table until it finds the relevant rows. The bigger the table, the more this costs. If the table has an index for the columns in question, MySQL can quickly get a position to seek to in the middle of the data file without having to look at all the data. If a table has 1000 rows, this is at least 100 times faster than reading sequentially. Note that if you need to access almost all 1000 rows it is faster to read sequentially because we then avoid disk seeks.

All MySQL indexes (PRIMARY, UNIQUE, and INDEX) are stored in B-trees. Strings are automatically prefix- and end-space compressed. See section 7.36 CREATE INDEX Syntax.

Indexes are used to:

Suppose you issue the following SELECT statement: 

mysql> SELECT * FROM tbl_name WHERE col1=val1 AND col2=val2;

If a multiple-column index exists on col1 and col2, the appropriate rows can be fetched directly. If separate single-column indexes exist on col1 and col2, the optimizer tries to find the most restrictive index by deciding which index will find fewer rows and using that index to fetch the rows.

If the table has a multiple-column index, any leftmost prefix of the index can be used by the optimizer to find rows. For example, if you have a three-column index on (col1,col2,col3), you have indexed search capabilities on (col1), (col1,col2), and (col1,col2,col3).

MySQL can't use a partial index if the columns don't form a leftmost prefix of the index. Suppose you have the SELECT statements shown below: 

mysql> SELECT * FROM tbl_name WHERE col1=val1;
mysql> SELECT * FROM tbl_name WHERE col2=val2;
mysql> SELECT * FROM tbl_name WHERE col2=val2 AND col3=val3;

If an index exists on (col1,col2,col3), only the first query shown above uses the index. The second and third queries do involve indexed columns, but (col2) and (col2,col3) are not leftmost prefixes of (col1,col2,col3).

MySQL also uses indexes for LIKE comparisons if the argument to LIKE is a constant string that doesn't start with a wild-card character. For example, the following SELECT statements use indexes: 

mysql> select * from tbl_name where key_col LIKE "Patrick%";
mysql> select * from tbl_name where key_col LIKE "Pat%_ck%";

In the first statement, only rows with "Patrick" <= key_col < "Patricl" are considered. In the second statement, only rows with "Pat" <= key_col < "Pau" are considered.

The following SELECT statements will not use indexes: 

mysql> select * from tbl_name where key_col LIKE "%Patrick%";
mysql> select * from tbl_name where key_col LIKE other_col;

In the first statement, the LIKE value begins with a wild-card character. In the second statement, the LIKE value is not a constant.

Searching using column_name IS NULL will use indexes if column_name is an index.

MySQL normally uses the index that finds the least number of rows. An index is used for columns that you compare with the following operators: =, >, >=, <, <=, BETWEEN, and a LIKE with a non-wild-card prefix like 'something%'.

Any index that doesn't span all AND levels in the WHERE clause is not used to optimize the query. In other words: To be able to use an index, a prefix of the index must be used in every AND group.

The following WHERE clauses use indexes: 

... WHERE index_part1=1 AND index_part2=2 AND other_column=3
... WHERE index=1 OR A=10 AND index=2      /* index = 1 OR index = 2 */
... WHERE index_part1='hello' AND index_part_3=5
          /* optimized like "index_part1='hello'" */
... WHERE index1=1 and index2=2 or index1=3 and index3=3;
          /* Can use index on index1 but not on index2 or index 3 */

These WHERE clauses do NOT use indexes: 

... WHERE index_part2=1 AND index_part3=2  /* index_part_1 is not used */
... WHERE index=1 OR A=10                  /* Index is not used in both AND parts */
... WHERE index_part1=1 OR index_part2=10  /* No index spans all rows */

Note that in some cases MySQL will not use an index, even if one would be available. Some of the cases where this happens are:

13.5 Speed of Queries that Access or Update Data

First, one thing that affects all queries: The more complex permission system setup you have, the more overhead you get.

If you do not have any GRANT statements done, MySQL will optimize the permission checking somewhat. So if you have a very high volume it may be worth the time to avoid grants. Otherwise more permission check results in a larger overhead.

If your problem is with some explicit MySQL function, you can always time this in the MySQL client: 

mysql> select benchmark(1000000,1+1);
+------------------------+
| benchmark(1000000,1+1) |
+------------------------+
|                      0 |
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.32 sec)

The above shows that MySQL can execute 1,000,000 + expressions in 0.32 seconds on a PentiumII 400MHz.

All MySQL functions should be very optimized, but there may be some exceptions, and the benchmark(loop_count,expression) is a great tool to find out if this is a problem with your query.

13.5.1 Estimating Query Performance

In most cases you can estimate the performance by counting disk seeks. For small tables, you can usually find the row in 1 disk seek (as the index is probably cached). For bigger tables, you can estimate that (using B++ tree indexes) you will need: log(row_count) / log(index_block_length / 3 * 2 / (index_length + data_pointer_length)) + 1 seeks to find a row.

In MySQL an index block is usually 1024 bytes and the data pointer is usually 4 bytes. A 500,000 row table with an index length of 3 (medium integer) gives you: log(500,000)/log(1024/3*2/(3+4)) + 1 = 4 seeks.

As the above index would require about 500,000 * 7 * 3/2 = 5.2M, (assuming that the index buffers are filled to 2/3, which is typical) you will probably have much of the index in memory and you will probably only need 1-2 calls to read data from the OS to find the row.

For writes, however, you will need 4 seek requests (as above) to find where to place the new index and normally 2 seeks to update the index and write the row.

Note that the above doesn't mean that your application will slowly degenerate by N log N! As long as everything is cached by the OS or SQL server things will only go marginally slower while the table gets bigger. After the data gets too big to be cached, things will start to go much slower until your applications is only bound by disk-seeks (which increase by N log N). To avoid this, increase the index cache as the data grows. See section 13.2.4 Tuning Server Parameters.

13.5.2 Speed of SELECT Queries

In general, when you want to make a slow SELECT ... WHERE faster, the first thing to check is whether or not you can add an index. See section 13.4 How MySQL Uses Indexes. All references between different tables should usually be done with indexes. You can use the EXPLAIN command to determine which indexes are used for a SELECT. See section 7.29 EXPLAIN Syntax (Get Information About a SELECT).

Some general tips:

13.5.3 How MySQL Optimizes WHERE Clauses

The WHERE optimizations are put in the SELECT part here because they are mostly used with SELECT, but the same optimizations apply for WHERE in DELETE and UPDATE statements.

Also note that this section is incomplete. MySQL does many optimizations, and we have not had time to document them all.

Some of the optimizations performed by MySQL are listed below:

Some examples of queries that are very fast: 

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl_name;
mysql> SELECT MIN(key_part1),MAX(key_part1) FROM tbl_name;
mysql> SELECT MAX(key_part2) FROM tbl_name
           WHERE key_part_1=constant;
mysql> SELECT ... FROM tbl_name
           ORDER BY key_part1,key_part2,... LIMIT 10;
mysql> SELECT ... FROM tbl_name
           ORDER BY key_part1 DESC,key_part2 DESC,... LIMIT 10;

The following queries are resolved using only the index tree (assuming the indexed columns are numeric): 

mysql> SELECT key_part1,key_part2 FROM tbl_name WHERE key_part1=val;
mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl_name
           WHERE key_part1=val1 AND key_part2=val2;
mysql> SELECT key_part2 FROM tbl_name GROUP BY key_part1;

The following queries use indexing to retrieve the rows in sorted order without a separate sorting pass: 

mysql> SELECT ... FROM tbl_name ORDER BY key_part1,key_part2,... ;
mysql> SELECT ... FROM tbl_name ORDER BY key_part1 DESC,key_part2 DESC,... ;

13.5.4 How MySQL Optimizes DISTINCT

DISTINCT is converted to a GROUP BY on all columns, DISTINCT combined with ORDER BY will in many cases also need a temporary table.

When combining LIMIT # with DISTINCT, MySQL will stop as soon as it finds # unique rows.

If you don't use columns from all used tables, MySQL will stop the scanning of the not used tables as soon as it has found the first match. 

SELECT DISTINCT t1.a FROM t1,t2 where t1.a=t2.a;

In the case, assuming t1 is used before t2 (check with EXPLAIN), then MySQL will stop reading from t2 (for that particular row in t1) when the first row in t2 is found.

13.5.5 How MySQL Optimizes LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN

A LEFT JOIN B in MySQL is implemented as follows:

RIGHT JOIN is implemented analogously as LEFT JOIN.

The table read order forced by LEFT JOIN and STRAIGHT JOIN will help the join optimizer (which calculates in which order tables should be joined) to do its work much more quickly, as there are fewer table permutations to check.

Note that the above means that if you do a query of type: 

SELECT * FROM a,b LEFT JOIN c ON (c.key=a.key) LEFT JOIN d (d.key=a.key) WHERE b.key=d.key

MySQL will do a full scan on b as the LEFT JOIN will force it to be read before d.

The fix in this case is to change the query to: 

SELECT * FROM b,a LEFT JOIN c ON (c.key=a.key) LEFT JOIN d (d.key=a.key) WHERE b.key=d.key

13.5.6 How MySQL Optimizes LIMIT

In some cases MySQL will handle the query differently when you are using LIMIT # and not using HAVING:

13.5.7 Speed of INSERT Queries

The time to insert a record consists approximately of:

where the numbers are somewhat proportional to the overall time. This does not take into consideration the initial overhead to open tables (which is done once for each concurrently running query).

The size of the table slows down the insertion of indexes by N log N (B-trees).

Some ways to speed up inserts:

To get some more speed for both LOAD DATA INFILE and INSERT, enlarge the key buffer. See section 13.2.4 Tuning Server Parameters.

13.5.8 Speed of UPDATE Queries

Update queries are optimized as a SELECT query with the additional overhead of a write. The speed of the write is dependent on the size of the data that is being updated and the number of indexes that are updated. Indexes that are not changed will not be updated.

Also, another way to get fast updates is to delay updates and then do many updates in a row later. Doing many updates in a row is much quicker than doing one at a time if you lock the table.

Note that, with dynamic record format, updating a record to a longer total length may split the record. So if you do this often, it is very important to OPTIMIZE TABLE sometimes. See section 7.11 OPTIMIZE TABLE Syntax.

13.5.9 Speed of DELETE Queries

If you want to delete all rows in the table, you should use TRUNCATE TABLE table_name. See section 7.18 TRUNCATE Syntax.

The time to delete a record is exactly proportional to the number of indexes. To delete records more quickly, you can increase the size of the index cache. See section 13.2.4 Tuning Server Parameters.

13.6 Other Optimization Tips

Unsorted tips for faster systems:

13.7 Using Your Own Benchmarks

You should definitely benchmark your application and database to find out where the bottlenecks are. By fixing it (or by replacing the bottleneck with a 'dummy module') you can then easily identify the next bottleneck (and so on). Even if the overall performance for your application is sufficient, you should at least make a plan for each bottleneck, and decide how to solve it if someday you really need the extra performance.

For an example of portable benchmark programs, look at the MySQL benchmark suite. See section 14 The MySQL Benchmark Suite. You can take any program from this suite and modify it for your needs. By doing this, you can try different solutions to your problem and test which is really the fastest solution for you.

It is very common that some problems only occur when the system is very heavily loaded. We have had many customers who contact us when they have a (tested) system in production and have encountered load problems. In every one of these cases so far, it has been problems with basic design (table scans are NOT good at high load) or OS/Library issues. Most of this would be a LOT easier to fix if the systems were not already in production.

To avoid problems like this, you should put some effort into benchmarking your whole application under the worst possible load! You can use Sasha's recent hack for this - super-smack. As the name suggests, it can bring your system down to its knees if you ask it, so make sure to use it only on your development systems.

13.8 Design Choices

MySQL keeps row data and index data in separate files. Many (almost all) other databases mix row and index data in the same file. We believe that the MySQL choice is better for a very wide range of modern systems.

Another way to store the row data is to keep the information for each column in a separate area (examples are SDBM and Focus). This will cause a performance hit for every query that accesses more than one column. Because this degenerates so quickly when more than one column is accessed, we believe that this model is not good for general purpose databases.

The more common case is that the index and data are stored together (like in Oracle/Sybase et al). In this case you will find the row information at the leaf page of the index. The good thing with this layout is that it, in many cases, depending on how well the index is cached, saves a disk read. The bad things with this layout are:

13.9 MySQL Design Limitations/Tradeoffs

Because MySQL uses extremely fast table locking (multiple readers / single writers) the biggest remaining problem is a mix of a steady stream of inserts and slow selects on the same table.

We believe that for a huge number of systems the extremely fast performance in other cases make this choice a win. This case is usually also possible to solve by having multiple copies of the table, but it takes more effort and hardware.

We are also working on some extensions to solve this problem for some common application niches.

13.10 Portability

Because all SQL servers implement different parts of SQL, it takes work to write portable SQL applications. For very simple selects/inserts it is very easy, but the more you need the harder it gets. If you want an application that is fast with many databases it becomes even harder!

To make a complex application portable you need to choose a number of SQL servers that it should work with.

You can use the MySQL crash-me program/web-page http://www.mysql.com/information/crash-me.php to find functions, types, and limits you can use with a selection of database servers. Crash-me now tests far from everything possible, but it is still comprehensive with about 450 things tested.

For example, you shouldn't have column names longer than 18 characters if you want to be able to use Informix or DB2.

Both the MySQL benchmarks and crash-me programs are very database-independent. By taking a look at how we have handled this, you can get a feeling for what you have to do to write your application database-independent. The benchmarks themselves can be found in the `sql-bench' directory in the MySQL source distribution. They are written in Perl with DBI database interface (which solves the access part of the problem).

See http://www.mysql.com/information/benchmarks.html for the results from this benchmark.

As you can see in these results, all databases have some weak points. That is, they have different design compromises that lead to different behavior.

If you strive for database independence, you need to get a good feeling for each SQL server's bottlenecks. MySQL is VERY fast in retrieving and updating things, but will have a problem in mixing slow readers/writers on the same table. Oracle, on the other hand, has a big problem when you try to access rows that you have recently updated (until they are flushed to disk). Transaction databases in general are not very good at generating summary tables from log tables, as in this case row locking is almost useless.

To get your application really database-independent, you need to define an easy extendable interface through which you manipulate your data. As C++ is available on most systems, it makes sense to use a C++ classes interface to the databases.

If you use some specific feature for some database (like the REPLACE command in MySQL), you should code a method for the other SQL servers to implement the same feature (but slower). With MySQL you can use the /*! */ syntax to add MySQL-specific keywords to a query. The code inside /**/ will be treated as a comment (ignored) by most other SQL servers.

If REAL high performance is more important than exactness, as in some Web applications, a possibility is to create an application layer that caches all results to give you even higher performance. By letting old results 'expire' after a while, you can keep the cache reasonably fresh. This is quite nice in case of extremely high load, in which case you can dynamically increase the cache and set the expire timeout higher until things get back to normal.

In this case the table creation information should contain information of the initial size of the cache and how often the table should normally be refreshed.

13.11 What Have We Used MySQL For?

During MySQL initial development, the features of MySQL were made to fit our largest customer. They handle data warehousing for a couple of the biggest retailers in Sweden.

From all stores, we get weekly summaries of all bonus card transactions, and we are expected to provide useful information for the store owners to help them find how their advertisement campaigns are affecting their customers.

The data is quite huge (about 7 million summary transactions per month), and we have data for 4-10 years that we need to present to the users. We got weekly requests from the customers that they want to get 'instant' access to new reports from this data.

We solved this by storing all information per month in compressed 'transaction' tables. We have a set of simple macros (script) that generates summary tables grouped by different criteria (product group, customer id, store ...) from the transaction tables. The reports are Web pages that are dynamically generated by a small Perl script that parses a Web page, executes the SQL statements in it, and inserts the results. We would have used PHP or mod_perl instead but they were not available at that time.

For graphical data we wrote a simple tool in C that can produce GIFs based on the result of a SQL query (with some processing of the result). This is also dynamically executed from the Perl script that parses the HTML files.

In most cases a new report can simply be done by copying an existing script and modifying the SQL query in it. In some cases, we will need to add more fields to an existing summary table or generate a new one, but this is also quite simple, as we keep all transactions tables on disk. (Currently we have at least 50G of transactions tables and 200G of other customer data.)

We also let our customers access the summary tables directly with ODBC so that the advanced users can themselves experiment with the data.

We haven't had any problems handling this with quite modest Sun Ultra SPARCstation (2x200 Mhz). We recently upgraded one of our servers to a 2 CPU 400 Mhz UltraSPARC, and we are now planning to start handling transactions on the product level, which would mean a ten-fold increase of data. We think we can keep up with this by just adding more disk to our systems.

We are also experimenting with Intel-Linux to be able to get more CPU power cheaper. Now that we have the binary portable database format (new in Version 3.23), we will start to use this for some parts of the application.

Our initial feelings are that Linux will perform much better on low-to-medium load and Solaris will perform better when you start to get a high load because of extreme disk IO, but we don't yet have anything conclusive about this. After some discussion with a Linux Kernel developer, this might be a side effect of Linux giving so much resources to the batch job that the interactive performance gets very low. This makes the machine feel very slow and unresponsive while big batches are going. Hopefully this will be better handled in future Linux Kernels.

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