Session
Eight Steps to Fix Your Database Performance Problem
Christopher Browne, Database Administrator, Afilias Canada
Track: Databases
Date: Thursday, July 27
Time: 2:35pm
- 3:20pm
Location: Portland 252
We examine eight methods to "attack" database performance problems. Frequently, minor system configuration problems can cause performance to suffer. This session presents various classes of these problems, with a view to addressing them without needing to modify the application.
- Check your logs. They often report information about what sorts of queries are running slowly, and OS logs may tell you if hardware failures are causing the slowdown.
- RAM, Disk or CPU: Determining which resource is being abused
- Database Configuration: Choosing what sizes of buffers to use; defaults are often not optimal
- Database Maintenance: Making sure queries aren't spinning their wheels reading empty space
- Table Analysis: Modern cost-based query optimizers require statistics on data distribution
- Disk Configuration: Disk arrays and smart RAID controllers can solve some performance woes
- Connection Pool management. Efficient use of database connections is often key, as connections can be expensive to create, and consume memory simply by existing.
- Analyzing test queries can suggest additional indexes that would improve performance
