Fast, Reliable, Proven transactional storage for MySQL


InnoDB Plugin 1.0.3 Performance Tests and Results

The 1.0.3 release of the InnoDB Plugin introduced several new performance-oriented features, to enhance concurrency and scalability, use more efficient memory allocation, improve out-of-the-box scalability and allow for dynamic tuning. Specifically, the release introduces these features:

  • The “Google SMP patch” using atomic instructions for mutexing
  • Ability to use more scalable platform memory allocator in place of internal InnoDB memory manager
  • Unlimited concurrent thread execution by default
  • At run-time, enable or disable insert buffering and adaptive hash indexing

These new performance features can yield up to twice the throughput or more, depending on your workload, platform and other tuning considerations. This release of the InnoDB Plugin scales significantly better than the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.1 as users are added on multi-core platforms. In several cases, the absolute level of performance is dramatically better, too.

We’ve tested three different workloads using a memory-resident database. These tests illustrated the benefits of using atomics for mutexing and of a more scalable memory allocator. Click on the following to review details of the tests run and the results observed.

We gratefully acknowledge a performance patch made by Ben Handy and Mark Callaghan at Google. This patch improves improve multi-core scalability by using more efficient synchronization methods (mutexing and rw-locks) to reduce cpu utilization and contention.

Third Party Tests of New InnoDB Plugin Features

A number of users have tested the performance aspects of two key new features introduced in the InnoDB Plugin: table and index compression and “Fast Index Creation”. These users have blogged on their findings, including performance results. Check out the articles mentioned on this page.