Tripp, YMMV, but I'm a firm believer that keeping things as simple as possible pays big dividends.
I believe the advice to spread out IO tasks among different disks is good advice, when dealing with direct-attached disks you deal with directly (i.e. not part of a RAID). The setup and maintenance is not inconsiderable, however, and performance will lag behind an array no matter what you do. If you're building a high-performance server, you may well want to consider moving away from individual disks and using hardware RAID for performance and redundancy. Once you're on such a device, you need to spend less/no time worrying about directing data to individual disks, because all your data is spread among mutiple disk spindles and can also use RAM caching in the device. You also likely have the option of dedicating a group of disks within the device for logging, while still utilizing all that hardware RAID has to offer. At my last job, we used an Apple XServe RAID to host our MySQL data, and performance was astounding. We also used Sun 3310 arrays to host our Sybase data, and performance was likewise astounding, though setup and administration was more complex than the Apple (you had more options too though). I say "astounding" considering what these advanced little boxes cost, which is just several thousand dollars. The Apple box has been certified on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Netware, so it's pretty versatile. There are also PCI card solutions that let you create a hardware RAID within your server box of course - ATA, SATA, and SCSI. Lots of options to choose from so you can select what fits your needs and budget. If you're wanting to build a high-availability setup, two server boxes with one Apple RAID, each using half the array, could be a very good setup, insulating you from hardware and software disasters. Expense is relative - I'd estimate you'd be looking at $25K for such a setup, easily more depending on your server boxes. You can do the same thing with many SCSI arrays (Sun 3310/3320s included) with some advanced setup work. Hope this helps, Dan On 8/1/06, Tripp Bishop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Howdy all, We're looking at building a new database server and I'm looking into strategies for optimizing disk i/o. Bit of background. We will be running a single database on this box under MySQL 5.0.15. All of the tables are INNODB. We have about 130 tables in the db. I've read that it's a good idea to have the innodb log files written out to a seperate physical drive so that those operations don't bog down the rest of the database disk I/O operations. Configuring INNODB to do that looks straightforward. Then there's the data. I know that I can create multiple shared table spaces and locate them on seperate disks but that doesn't seem to give me control over where individual tables' data are written on the disk array. Is there a way using innodb_file_per_table to control where the individual .idb files are located in the disk array? Do I have to use symbolic links to trick innodb or is there a cleaner way? Also, I've been told that innodb table spaces never shrink. Is this true or is there a way to periodically cleanup the idb files to reclaim unused space? Cheers, Tripp
-- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
