I’ve posted a new white paper about the implementation and benefits of Percona Server’s fast-restart capabilities. Briefly, after shutting down and restarting or rebooting the server, it can be back to full performance in a couple of minutes. That’s minutes, not hours or days. This matters a lot for keeping uptime high and reducing hardware requirements. There are a ton of benefits when you don’t have to obsess over how long it’s going to take to get the server back into production. Hot buzzword-compliant use cases definitely include cloud computing, because now you can get lots of memory in the cloud, but you still get terrible I/O performance so MySQL restarts take an eternity.
Read the white paper for the details; it is posted in the white paper section of our site and as always, is free to download and share with friends.
How does this compare with the fast InnoDB recovery in the recently GA’d MySQL 5.5? In what versions of Percona does the fast restart exist?
This is distinct from the fast recovery performance in recent versions of InnoDB (which is also present in newer 5.1 releases with the plugin, and in XtraDB for quite a while before that in a less optimal form). Recovery time doesn’t impact restart time unless the database was shut down uncleanly. The feature was introduced in releases about a year ago, but automatic dump/restore functionality was added in version 5.1.50-12.1. I don’t really think the feature was very useful or helpful before this, honestly; manual operation of a feature like this isn’t a big benefit.