MySQL Cluster Interconnects and Performance

The ndbd process has a number of simple constructs which are used to access the data in a MySQL Cluster. We have created a very simple benchmark to check the performance of each of these and the effects which various interconnects have on their performance.

There are four access methods:

With benchmarks developed internally by MySQL for testing simple and batched primary and unique key accesses, we have found that using SCI sockets improves performance by approximately 100% over TCP/IP, except in rare instances when communication performance is not an issue. This can occur when scan filters make up most of processing time or when very large batches of primary key accesses are achieved. In that case, the CPU processing in the ndbd processes becomes a fairly large part of the overhead.

Using the SCI transporter instead of SCI Sockets is only of interest in communicating between ndbd processes. Using the SCI transporter is also only of interest if a CPU can be dedicated to the ndbd process because the SCI transporter ensures that this process will never go to sleep. It is also important to ensure that the ndbd process priority is set in such a way that the process does not lose priority due to running for an extended period of time, as can be done by locking processes to CPUs in Linux 2.6. If such a configuration is possible, the ndbd process will benefit by 10–70% as compared with using SCI sockets. (The larger figures will be seen when performing updates and probably on parallel scan operations as well.)

There are several other optimized socket implementations for computer clusters, including Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband and the VIA interface. However, we have tested MySQL Cluster so far only with SCI sockets. See Section, “Configuring MySQL Cluster to use SCI Sockets”, for information on how to set up SCI sockets using ordinary TCP/IP for MySQL Cluster.