Thanks for your reply. I failed to mention that these are MYISAM tables, so no transactions. And like I said, this is not a production box nor is there any application running, so there's no contention for the tables being locked. I'm trying to update a database design on two tables with 200 million records each, so anything I can do to increase the performance of these long running queries will shorten the migration running time.
What I was referring to was that in the documentation, that when using LOCK TABLES, mysql does not update the key cache until the lock is released, versus when not using LOCK TABLES it does update the key cache on each insert/update/delete. see: http://tuxradar.com/practicalphp/18/2/22 In my testing, I'm seeing a slow down when I use LOCK TABLES versus running the same queries without it. I'm just trying to find a reason why that might be the case. -Hank On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 12:42 AM, Antony T Curtis <antonycur...@verizon.net>wrote: > LOCK TABLES...WRITE is very likely to reduce performance if you are using a > transactional storage engine, such as InnoDB/XtraDB or PBXT. The reason is > that only one connection is holding the write lock and no other concurrent > operation may occur on the table. > > LOCK TABLES is only really useful for non-transactional tables and maybe a > few specialized operations where it has its advantages but for 99.9% of > cases, it should not be used. > > What does increase performance is the proper use of transactions with > appropriate use of SELECT...FOR UPDATE and SELECT...LOCK IN SHARE MODE. > > Regards, > > Antony. > > > > On 21 Sep 2011, at 20:34, Hank wrote: > > According to everything I've read, using LOCK TABLES...WRITE for updates, >> inserts and deletes should improve performance of mysql server, but I >> think >> I've been seeing the opposite effect. >> >> I've been doing quite a bit of testing on a 64bit install of CentOS 5.5 >> installed as a guest OS on a VMWare ESXi 4.0 hypervisor on a Dell R610. >> There are no other VMs on this box, and there are no other users or >> threads >> running on the OS. Just me. I'm using this box strictly for testing of >> large database migration scripts. >> >> It seems like when I execute some of these long running statements without >> locking the tables, the code runs quite a bit faster than when I do lock >> the >> tables. And before testing each run, I do restart the server so there is >> no >> query caching and I also use FLUSH TABLES between each test run. >> >> All I'm asking is this: Can anything think of a scenario on a single >> user-box and mysql instance, that locking tables would cause these DML >> statements to slow down compared to not locking the tables? >> >> Thanks, >> >> -Hank >> > >
