Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I)

MySQL Benchmarking and Monitoring :

An overview of currently available tools with an introduction to the features of each and a demonstration of using each tool against a running Database.

Intended Audience:

DBA’s , Developers, managers assessing MySQL performance, System Admins.

So you want to know how many requests your database can handle before performance begins to degrade? What is the cost/benefit of various indexing strategies. What is the cost of foreign keys, triggers and stored procedures. What is faster in your situation MyISAM or INNODB ? Perhaps your boss wants to know what sort of machine he should purchase for the migration to MySQL. Or perhaps your website traffic is growing exponentially, how do you make the big decisions about capacity, hardware utilization, budgeting and future planning? The answer is benchmarks. This session will show you the tools you need to gather relevant useful benchmarks.

In addition you might want to know, how much disk is left after your online subscriptions grow by %100. Or how much CPU or network traffic is your MySQL server generating. What you need in this case is good Monitoring tools. There is a wide variety of monitoring tools available, from the text based, to the graphical, from the email alert to the phone call, the pager, the alarms and the red lights. Learn how each tool works and find the one that works best for you.

45 minutes on benchmarking:

Obtaining realistic and relevant benchmarks of the performance of your MySQL servers is invaluable. So where does a weary DBA turn to when he needs to get this data ? Fortunately there are many tools available for you. However deciding what tool is right and understanding the features and details of each can be a lengthy process of its own. In this session you will get working examples of most flexible , easy to use, and configurable tools available to day. Every DataBase is different and every use case is different, you need accurate benchmarks that reflect the performance of YOUR database. In this session we will cover the following tools.

• mysqlslap
• sql-bench
• supersmack
• Apache Bench (combined with some sample PHP scripts)
• MySQL’s benchmark() function
• MyBench
• WAST
• JMeter

45 minutes on monitoring:

Benchmarking your servers performance is just half the picture however. What about Monitoring a running server ? Well Monitoring your server is at least as important as Benchmarking and there are a wide array of tools available for the job. In the next 45 minutes of the session we will demonstrate and review the features of the available MySQL monitoring tools.

• Enterprise Monitor
• Cacti
• Xenoss
• Innotop
• MyTop
• Munin
• Nagios
• MyTOP and/or MTTOP