Among all the databases you can find in the market, MySQL is probably the most complex one. What makes it complicated is that it may go on a standstill without warning, which means that operations in your business will also be interfered with. It is, however, important to note that most MySQL performance issues originate from common and simple mistakes.
It is critical to ensure that your MySQL servers are working as expected, that is, they have a consistent and stable performance at having perfect speed. To do so, you will need to ward off some of the mentioned (common) mistakes. The following are tips on how you can vamp up the performance of MySQL.
1. Profile your workload
The first step towards tuning the performance of MySQL is profiling the server’s workload. Why is it essential? Well, by so doing, you will be able to bring out the most expensive queries for further improvement. You can do useful profiling with the help of MySQL Enterprise Monitor’s query analyzer. What the tool does is to get the queries that the server implements after which sorts tasks in the order of decreasing response time.
That way, the most time consuming and expensive tasks are brought to the top making it easy for you to focus your efforts. The job of profiling is to bring together queries that have similar characteristics making it possible for you to distinguish the queries that require the least and the most execution time.
2. Familiarize yourself with the four fundamental resources
For a database server to function effectively and efficiently, it needs the CPU, disk, memory, and network. Those are the four primary resources. If any of these do not work as they should be, the server will equally be prone to poor performance. Therefore, the four resources should at all costs not be erratic, weak and overloaded.
What does understanding the four fundamental resources entail? Well, it is all about selecting the right hardware and being conversant with troubleshooting problems. While choosing hardware for MySQL, ensure that the components perform well. More so, they should all be balanced: that is, regarding their performance. Employ fast CPUs and get the adequate memory to avoid overworking the disk. When it comes to troubleshooting, you should keep a keen eye on the four components to ascertain that they are all working correctly or are only being overworked. That way it will be easy for you to come up with solutions.
3. Refrain from using MySQL as a queue
Why will queuing be an issue to the performance of your MySQL? What queuing does is serializing your workload. It, in turn, interferes with tasks being done in parallel. Being unable to work in parallel results in a table which has both historical data from tasks that were performed ages ago and work in process. The two cause load to MySQL and discontinuation to the application.
4. Filter results
Another excellent way of tuning the performance of MySQL is sorting the work in order of the most unspecific and the cheap work first, followed by precise and hard work in the set of data you will get. Â
 5. Identify scalability
In this case, you can apply the Universal Scalability Law. The law will help you quantify and express the properties of scalability of a system. Â What it does is scale it regarding crosstalk and serialization. Note that if parallel processes have to discontinue to allow something that is serialized to take place, then it means that the procedures are short of scalability. Therefore, warding off serialization and crosstalk will go a long way in helping your server scale better.
6. Stop directing all your focus on configuration
It is true that the MySQL database is shipped with defaults that are mostly outdated. However, that does not mean you need to configure everything. It is wise to change the settings only if need be. Working on only ten cases should be okay. It will improve the performance of the server. Remember that changing configurations will take a lot of time: which means that it will not work in favor of the performance of MySQL.
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