Summary

The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark

What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2

MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper

Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use

Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL Cluster 7.2 is extensions made to the multi-threading processes of the data nodes.

Multi-Threaded Data Node Extensions
The MySQL Cluster 7.2 data node is now functionally divided into seven thread types:
1) Local Data Manager threads (ldm). Note – these are sometimes also called LQH threads.
2) Transaction Coordinator threads (tc)
3) Asynchronous Replication threads (rep)
4) Schema Management threads (main)
5) Network receiver threads (recv)
6) Network send threads (send)
7) IO threads

Each of these thread types are discussed in more detail below.

MySQL Cluster 7.2 increases the maximum number of LDM threads from 4 to 16. The LDM contains the actual data, which means that when using 16 threads the data is more heavily partitioned (this is automatic in MySQL Cluster). Each LDM thread maintains its own set of data partitions, index partitions and REDO log. The number of LDM partitions per data node is not dynamically configurable, but it is possible, however, to map more than one partition onto each LDM thread, providing flexibility in modifying the number of LDM threads.

The TC domain stores the state of in-flight transactions. This means that every new transaction can easily be assigned to a new TC thread. Testing has shown that in most cases 1 TC thread per 2 LDM threads is sufficient, and in many cases even 1 TC thread per 4 LDM threads is also acceptable. Testing also demonstrated that in some instances where the workload needed to sustain very high update loads it is necessary to configure 3 to 4 TC threads per 4 LDM threads. In the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release, only one TC thread was available. This limit has been increased to 16 TC threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2. The TC domain also manages the Adaptive Query Localization functionality introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2 that significantly enhanced complex query performance by pushing JOIN operations down to the data nodes.

Asynchronous Replication was separated into its own thread with the release of MySQL Cluster 7.1, and has not been modified in the latest 7.2 release.

To scale the number of TC threads, it was necessary to separate the Schema Management domain from the TC domain. The schema management thread has little load, so is implemented with a single thread.

The Network receiver domain was bound to 1 thread in MySQL Cluster 7.1. With the increase of threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2 it is also necessary to increase the number of recv threads to 8. This enables each receive thread to service one or more sockets used to communicate with other nodes the Cluster.

The Network send thread is a new thread type introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Previously other threads handled the sending operations themselves, which can provide for lower latency. To achieve highest throughput however, it has been necessary to create dedicated send threads, of which 8 can be configured. It is still possible to configure MySQL Cluster 7.2 to a legacy mode that does not use any of the send threads – useful for those workloads that are most sensitive to latency.

The IO Thread is the final thread type and there have been no changes to this domain in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Multiple IO threads were already available, which could be configured to either one thread per open file, or to a fixed number of IO threads that handle the IO traffic. Except when using compression on disk, the IO threads typically have a very light load.

Benchmarking the Scalability Enhancements

The scalability enhancements discussed above have made it possible to scale CPU usage of each data node to more than 5x of that possible in MySQL Cluster 7.1. In addition, a number of bottlenecks have been removed, making it possible to scale data node performance by even more than 5x.

Figure 2: MySQL Cluster 7.2 Delivers 8.4x Higher Performance than 7.1

The flexAsynch benchmark was used to compare MySQL Cluster 7.2 performance to 7.1 across an 8-node Intel Xeon x5670-based cluster of dual socket commodity servers (6 cores each).

As the results demonstrate, MySQL Cluster 7.2 delivers over 8x higher performance per data nodes than MySQL Cluster 7.1.

More details of this and other benchmarks will be published in a new whitepaper – coming soon, so stay tuned!

In a following blog post, I’ll provide recommendations on optimum thread configurations for different types of server processor. You can also learn more from the Best Practices Guide to Optimizing Performance of MySQL Cluster

Conclusion

MySQL Cluster has achieved a range of impressive benchmark results, and set in context with the previous 7.1 release, is able to deliver over 8x higher performance per node.

As a result, the multi-threaded data node extensions not only serve to increase performance of MySQL Cluster, they also enable users to achieve significantly improved levels of utilization from current and future generations of massively multi-core, multi-thread processor designs.