As continue to my benchmarks https://www.percona.com/blog/2009/04/30/looking-on-54-io-bound-benchmarks/ on 5.4 I tried in-memory load (basically changed buffer pool from 3GB to 15GB, and database size is 10GB). The results are on the same spreadsheet http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rYZB2dd2j1pQsvWs2kFvTsg&hl=en#, page CPUBound.
I especially made short warmup (120 sec) and long run (2700sec) to see how different versions go through warmup stage.
The graph is
In default mode I would say XtraDB performs almost the same as 5.4, but dips are a bit worse than in 5.4.
Now about dips – all of them are caused by InnoDB checkpoint activity, InnoDB is doing intensive flushing of buffer_pool pages and that basically causes stall for some period of time in all user processes.
In XtraDB we have special mode adaptive_checkpoint, you see result in this mode. While max performance is worse, there is no dips, and average performance is better.
If Sun Perfomance engineers read this – I call attention to this problem and do not ignore it if Sun started to make changes to InnoDB anyway.
If InnoDB engineers read this and are interested – then, yes, we are ready to provide adaptive_checkpoint patch under BSD license.
Also I was asked what if we set small innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct , will not that help with such dips – you can see results for 5.4 with innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct=15. There really no dips, but average performance is not acceptable. I also tried innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct=30, but results in this case similar to usual 5.4, so I do not show them.
