maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to redesign the InnoDB redo log format for better
performance in MariaDB 10.4. Part of this would involve minimizing
write amplification and optimizing for journaled file systems.

Jun Su from Microsoft suggested to me that regular writes (as opposed
to appends) could cause some write amplification inside journaled file
systems.

InnoDB traditionally pre-allocates both data and log files. Maybe it
was a good idea in 1994 when the code was initially conceived. But we
have had journaled or copy-on-write file systems and also SSDs for
quite some time now.

I wrote two test programs that write a 2GiB file in 2KiB blocks,
either pre-allocating the file upfront, or appending to the file. On
the two SSDs that I tested (with ext4fs), appending was always faster.
The programs are attached to
https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-14425

I would appreciate it if someone can provide a counterexample where
writing to a preallocated file would be faster than appending, on a
modern file system. Also, I would like to see how HDDs would perform.

With best regards,

Marko
-- 
Marko Mäkelä, Lead Developer InnoDB
MariaDB Corporation

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