Analysis of Google patches in MySQL 5.4

Early on in the MySQL 5.4 development we tried out the
impact of the Google SMP patch and the Google IO patch.
At first we wanted to see which of the patches that
made most of an impact. The Google patches in MySQL 5.4
have 3 components at least that impact the performance.
1) Replace InnoDB memory manager by a malloc variant
2) Replace InnoDB RW-lock implementation
3) Make InnoDB use more IO threads

When disabling the InnoDB one opens up for a whole array
of potential candidates for malloc. Our work concluded
that tcmalloc behaved best on Linux and mtmalloc was
best on Solaris, see blog posts on Solaris below.

Malloc on Solaris investigation

Battle of the Mallocators on Solaris

I did also do some testing on Linux where I compared 4 different
cases (all variants were based on MySQL 5.1.28):
1) Using the Google SMP patch, Google IO patch (with 4 read and
4 write threads) and using tcmalloc
2) Using tcmalloc and no other Google patches
3) Using plain malloc from libc
4) Using plain MySQL 5.1.28 using InnoDB memory manager

Here are the results:


So as we can see here the replacement of the InnoDB memory manager
by standard malloc had no benefits whereas replacing it with
tcmalloc gave 10% extra performance. The Google SMP patch added
another 10% performance in sysbench readwrite. We have also
tested other OLTP benchmarks where the Google SMP patch added
about 5-10% performance improvement. As shown by Mark Callaghan
there are however other benchmarks where the Google SMP patch
provides much greater improvements.