XtraDB benchmarks – 1.5X gain in IO-bound load

December 18, 2008
Author
Vadim Tkachenko
Share this Post:

I guess it is first reaction on new storage engine – show me benefits. So there is benchmark I made on one our servers. It is Dell 2950 with 8CPU cores and RAID10 on 6 disks with BBU, and 32GB RAM on board with CentOS 5.2 as OS. This is quite typical server we recommend to run MySQL on. What is important I used Noop IO scheduler, instead of default CFQ. Disclaimer: Please note you may not get similar benefits on less powerful servers, as most important fixes in XtraDB are related to multi-core and multi-disks utilization. Also results may be different if load is CPU bound.


I compared MySQL 5.1.30 trees – MySQL 5.1.30 with standard InnoDB, MySQL 5.1.30 with InnoDB-plugin-1.0.2 and MySQL 5.1.30 with XtraDB (all plugins statically compiled in MySQL)

For benchmarks I used scripts that emulate TPCC load and datasize 40W (about 4GB in size), 20 client connections. Please note I used innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2G and innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT to emulate IO bound load.

InnoDB parameters:

And for XtraDB I additionally used:

So what is in result:

Result is in NOTPM (New Order Transactions Per Minute), more is better. As you see XtraDB is somewhat 1.5x better than InnoDB in standard 5.1.30 and even more than InnoDB-plugin-1.0.2

And there is CPU utilization for all tested engines:

As you see XtraDB also utilizes CPUs better.

Finally let me show you why I took NOOP IO scheduler instead of CFQ, there are result for XtraDB with both:

4X difference is just giant one. And it is important to remember as Linux kernels 2.6.18+ (which are used on CentOS / RedHat 5.2) are coming with CFQ scheduler as default.
So

should be one of first things to do on new server (sure you also need to change kernel startup parameter to make it automatic after reboot).

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Far
Enough.

Said no pioneer ever.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, InnoDB, MariaDB, MongoDB and Kubernetes are trademarks for their respective owners.
© 2026 Percona All Rights Reserved