Performance Audits

What Is A Performance Audit?

Performance Audits are one of Percona's most popular services. It is a comprehensive review your MySQL server's configuration, operating system, hardware configuration, application architecture, table design, indexing, queries, capacity, and scaling potential. If performance problems lie outside of MySQL, such as in your web server, we can usually diagnose that too.

How Are Audits Conducted?

Audits are usually done by an initial browsing of your system remotely, and then communicating via phone, chat, and email. We try to make it an interactive process. We begin with a kickoff call with your key technical staff to understand your goals and pain points. After that our approach is like a physician trying to discover an undiagnosed malady. We scan for anomalies in every aspect of your server's configuration, performance, and contents. Percona's Director of Consulting, Mr. Baron Schwartz, describes the audit process at length in a blog article available here. Before starting you should also read Percona's Access Readiness Checklist. It details preparatory steps to avoid wasted billable time.

How Much Billable Time Is Needed?

You as customer determine the depth and complexity of the analysis we do. Percona's by the hour, no obligation, no lock-in pricing give you this flexibility. However for audits to be useful, you need to allow us a reasonable minimum number of hours. Most systems need about 10 hours for a good audit, and complex ones might need more. If your budget limits you to less, we will do our best, but know that the depth or scope of analysis will be correspondingly reduced. Five hours is the minimum length audit we will attempt.

What Is the Outcome?

Our consultants log everything they do while on your system. This becomes the basis for our written report to you afterwards. Our goal is to show you everything we reviewed, even if it checked out okay. We also want you to fully understand the thinking behind all of our recommendations. Most audits lead to substantial performance gains. Audits are for when your MySQL application is already suffering performance woes, or for when you are preparing for intense growth. You decide whether you want us to look but don't touch, or fix things as we go and tell you about it later.