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Serty Oan
Asked: 2010-06-17 00:01:41 +0800 CST

MySQL & tmpfs : performance

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I was wondering if, and how much, using tmpfs could improve MySQL performance and how it should be done ? My guess would be to do mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M /path/to/mysql/data/DatabaseName, and to use the database normally but maybe I'm wrong (I'm using MyISAM tables only).

Will a hourly rsync between the tmpfs /path/to/mysql/data/DatabaseName and /path/to/mysql/data/DatabaseName_backup penalize performances ? If so, how should I make the backup of the tmpfs database ?

So, is it a good way to do things, is there a better way or am I losing my time ?

performance linux mysql tmpfs

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I answered a similar question here when someone was asking how to load a MySQL database to memory. There's a native ENGINE in MySQL among other potential solutions, which are better for most situations.

    For MyISAM tables, your proposed solution would be functional.

    The rsync shouldn't necessarily penalize performance but it could if your system was really low on resources, as high I/O utilization would impact system performance as a whole. In most cases, I'd say it wouldn't but only way to be sure is to test.

    The ramdisk solution seems risky to me. In case of power loss, data could be lost, as your rsync would not be realtime. You could replication the database to a slave, which could store on a disk. The startup on MySQL on the ramdisk server could scp from that host into the ramdisk before starting the instance.

    If your MySQL instance was not well optimized, you would notice substantial performance gains. If well optimized, I'd suspect that the gains would be less. The only way to be sure is to use tools like Super Smack, MySQL Benchmark, and sysbench to quantity the performance.

    Good luck.

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