Performance tuning basics

I have been getting a lot of questions about performance tuning this month. So this will be the first in a series on the basics.

Go get your copies of High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More and MySQL Administrator's Bible¹ and read up on benchmarking. Also take a peek at George Trujillo's MOCA. These readings will provide you with a overview of the methods and approaches you will see in later entries. The goal is to get a baseline measurement so that a change can be evaluated as an improvement or a determent.

Then do a fresh install of MySQL server on a non production system.

And lastly get a copy of your new installation's option file, usually my.cnf or my.ini for Windows systems. But do not be surprised if your system does not have one.

To be continued

Next time: A simple test using mysqlslap

1. You should have need to have copies of these books in your library.