Nice article! I wonder if now, with all the NUMA stuff and processors with hundreds of cores something changed sufficiently enough that it warrants another complete redesign similar to what happened in the article
A lot of the article talked about swap which wouldn't be a concern in normal operation of most production servers--cache/memory locality still matters but not as dramatically. Back when I was managing bare-metal MySQL servers we were getting scaling to NUMA memory (with jemalloc/tcmalloc). There was an initial performance degradation that required a lot of fine-tuning even working around how the same motherboard/CPUs would initialize core affinities differently. A new problem was deadlocking of large transactions that touched multiple buffer instances. Mind you this wasn't a clean codebase that put a lot of thought into avoiding deadlocks (up until then).
At the time I didn't think much about how the allocators could help as they're constrained to the ABI. Writing in Zig with custom allocators for everything would. The only mysql NUMA setting was innodb_numa_interleave=ON which wasn't very good but not a lot worse than trying harder.
"... spending an hour over breakfast, chatting with Dennis Ritchie about device nodes and timekeeping in early UNIX kernels"
Wow, what an incredible experience!
Nice article! I wonder if now, with all the NUMA stuff and processors with hundreds of cores something changed sufficiently enough that it warrants another complete redesign similar to what happened in the article
A lot of the article talked about swap which wouldn't be a concern in normal operation of most production servers--cache/memory locality still matters but not as dramatically. Back when I was managing bare-metal MySQL servers we were getting scaling to NUMA memory (with jemalloc/tcmalloc). There was an initial performance degradation that required a lot of fine-tuning even working around how the same motherboard/CPUs would initialize core affinities differently. A new problem was deadlocking of large transactions that touched multiple buffer instances. Mind you this wasn't a clean codebase that put a lot of thought into avoiding deadlocks (up until then).
At the time I didn't think much about how the allocators could help as they're constrained to the ABI. Writing in Zig with custom allocators for everything would. The only mysql NUMA setting was innodb_numa_interleave=ON which wasn't very good but not a lot worse than trying harder.