Semi OT: MySQL memory probs...

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 16:57 -0600, alex at crackpot.org wrote:
> Quoting Randy Melder <randymelder at gmail.com>:
> 
> > We've got an environment with ALL innodb tables and been forced to use
> > OS X servers. They are total memory and CPU hogs. Just hoping there
> > were some people that had some insight into OS X server, why it abuses
> > virtual memory and how best to deploy mysql on it.
> >
> > Me thinks that the MySQL binary has memory leaks... but that's just a guess.
> 
> If you're using all innodb tables, use a tiny key buffer.  Currently,  
> you're allocating 2GB of RAM in a buffer that will probably never be  
> used.  Temporary tables will still be created as MyISAM, but I'm  
> thinking that they can't benefit much from a key cache anyway (unless  
> you have long-running threads that create temp tables and keep them  
> around for  along time).
> 
> Way back in 2005 there was a pretty interesting report/benchmark which  
> basically boiled down to "MySQL on OSX is horribly broken".  The  
> testers lay the blame more with the OS (and it's threading  
> implementation) than with MySQL.  MySQL has gone through many releases  
> since then, and Apple hardware has switched from PowerPC to Intel  
> chips, and several OSX updates have been released.  I'm not sure if  
> this is still relevant, but it's an interesting read.
> 
> "Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in  
> creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go  
> through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the  
> G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database  
> performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system  
> that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads."
> 
> http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8
> 
----
oh oh - holy war

;-)

Craig