SUPPORT/
TECHNICAL
ASSISTANCE TROUBLESHOOTING:

Context:

The customer has a server dedicated to its MySQL database with over 2 million records and is experiencing a period of high traffic following the launch of its activities. It has a read-only MyISAM table for user search queries, the performance of which is degrading significantly and it would like to resolve this very quickly and permanently.

Problem solving approach:

Developed and tested several approaches to optimising and improving the performance of searches on the MyISAM table in question, including :

• reducing the RAM size

• Loading all MyISAM indexes into memory (RAM)

• converting all VARCHARs to CHARs

• using the cache

Result:

Improve read performance by ~25% by fixing the table data size (approach 3 -> FIXED CHAR).

Technical stack used:

MysSQL, Linux