We just published results with improvements in Thread Pool in Percona Server:
Percona Server: Thread Pool Improvements for Transactional Workloads
Percona Server: Improve Scalability with Thread Pool
What I am happy to see is that Percona Server is able to handle a tremendous amount of user connections. From our charts you can see it can go to 16000 active connections without a decline in throughput.
In fact, in our experiments we used 25000 connections and even more, so I think now we face OS limitations in handling connections as opposed to Percona Server’s limitations. From the posts above, both MySQL and MariaDB drop to the floor somewhere along the way.
You may ask a valid question if 16000 connections are really necessary. I would say that in regular workloads we do see this, but I propose to think about this as an electrical fuse, one that provides overcurrent protection. See my post SimCity outages, traffic control and Thread Pool for MySQL.
Even you do not have many connections on regular days, one mention from Yahoo’s homepage or from Hacker News will change that in a moment. Thread Pool will act as protection from overloading a database.
There is also another application for Thread Pool. I often see that application layer creates its own connection pool (think Java), and with ~20-30 app servers it can get to ~3000 connections, and this is already problematic… but not for Percona Server!
