I have read through chapter 6 of the documentation (Optimization) and
still have a couple specific questions. The documentation seems to
make broad strokes and I need the finishing brush.

My system is a single processor Quad core Xeon with 8GB of ram. Linux
is installed on a simple raid 1 and the mysql data directory is
4x500GB sata II in a raid 0.

The documentation talks about table buffers and a few other cache
settings. Considering this server is specifically tasked for mysql
data conversion and nothing else what settings would you recommend me
to use for maximum speed? Recovery is irrelevant since it is a large
data dump that can be reloaded quickly if the system should completely
fail. It is an "in-out" server in that the data is loaded and
converted/tweaked then brought into the main production system.

Any is appreciated.

CJ

Curious Joe wrote:
> I have read through chapter 6 of the documentation (Optimization) and
> still have a couple specific questions. The documentation seems to
> make broad strokes and I need the finishing brush.
>
> My system is a single processor Quad core Xeon with 8GB of ram. Linux
> is installed on a simple raid 1 and the mysql data directory is
> 4x500GB sata II in a raid 0.
>
> The documentation talks about table buffers and a few other cache
> settings. Considering this server is specifically tasked for mysql
> data conversion and nothing else what settings would you recommend me
> to use for maximum speed? Recovery is irrelevant since it is a large
> data dump that can be reloaded quickly if the system should completely
> fail. It is an "in-out" server in that the data is loaded and
> converted/tweaked then brought into the main production system.

Selection of file system can be a good thing to do, ext2/ext3 are a bit slow,
I would recommend XFS, other good options are JFS and ReiserFS.

If you are using many times the same SQL question, then SQL CACHE is a good
thing to use in the SELECT. If you use this on too many different SQL
questions, then you will use up the RAM fast.

--

//Aho

Curious Joe <joebob.johnson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have read through chapter 6 of the documentation (Optimization) and
> still have a couple specific questions. The documentation seems to
> make broad strokes and I need the finishing brush.
>
> My system is a single processor Quad core Xeon with 8GB of ram. Linux
> is installed on a simple raid 1 and the mysql data directory is
> 4x500GB sata II in a raid 0.
>
> The documentation talks about table buffers and a few other cache
> settings. Considering this server is specifically tasked for mysql
> data conversion and nothing else what settings would you recommend me
> to use for maximum speed? Recovery is irrelevant since it is a large
> data dump that can be reloaded quickly if the system should completely
> fail. It is an "in-out" server in that the data is loaded and
> converted/tweaked then brought into the main production system.

The excellent SQL Tuning Primer is a script that
generates recommendations for tuning your MySQL
settings: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/view.php?id=44

Other than that, we would need to know what OS, 32 vs 64
bit, InnoDB vs. MyISAM, to make specific recommendations.