Followup on performance metrics: slides, video

A while back, I wrote a two part post on how you can extract an amazing amount of information about a system’s performance, scalability, queueing, and more by just measuring request arrivals and completions, and the timestamps thereof.

I promised to develop this into a more complete description of how to analyze MySQL’s performance and scalability through nothing more than TCP/IP packet headers. I presented the results of that research at Percona Live in New York City, and the slides and video are online. The video editors didn’t synch the slides up quite perfectly with the video, so I encourage you to have the slides open while you watch the video. I will also be treating this presentation as a first draft of a white paper that lays out the techniques and the results very clearly; in watching the video, I don’t think I always took enough time to explain things perfectly (although I did end perfectly on time). So for those of you who are interested, I believe that a set of powerful tools and techniques is emerging from this research. Stay tuned — there is more to come.