MySQL Performance Schema – Comprehensive Guide

This solution is called a multi-tenant design where each tenant (customer) has their own database. Given that, there are some other considerations to the alternative approach which is a single database:

1. With a single database, everyone must be on the same version no matter what. It isn't possible to upgrade some customers and not others. This can be problematic if a customer wants a hotfix of an application that isn't ready for wide release.
2. With a single database, when you do an upgrade, every client is down. If something goes wrong, every client is screwed.
3. With a single database, it is much more difficult to throttle resources. I.e., if one client is hammering the database, it is harder to give them more resources separate from everyone else.
4. It is much more difficult to allow users to host their own versions of your application. If you are building a solution that will be used by large enterprises, this is often a non-starter. Their IT department wants complete control over access to the system.
5. It is probably cheaper to scale out databases rather than scale them up. I.e., having to invest in faster hardware to host one database to rule them all is probably more expensive than being able to scale customers out to smaller, less expensive database servers. I can't say this one definitively because it depends greatly on the server software. If you stick with MySQL, this is probably true because the licensing costs are negligible. However, if you move up to SQL Server for example, scaling out becomes much more expensive unless you use a VPS environment and the cost-benefit of scaling up vs. scaling out changes. I can say, however, that once your database gets very large, management requires ever-greater levels of expertise. Very large databases require playing around with multiple filegroups and pushing certain indexes to different spindles to get better performance. In short, they get can complicated very quickly.

Having separate databases does mean you have to build an update mechanism which matches the database version with the application/site version. However, separate databases do provide superior isolation of data and IMO have a lower cost of hosting. It isn't a solution for all scenarios. If your system were never going to be hosted outside of your hosting and needed to scale up in customers rapidly and having all users on the same version of the application and database schema was desirable, then certainly having a single database is a better approach.

You have to crank up innodb_io_capacity as well.

The default is 200. Raise it to 5000 for starters. I would go to 20000.

You may also want to make sure ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 are sufficiently large. The default value for innodb_log_file_size is 5M. I would raise that to 1G for starters.

A larger InnoDB Buffer Pool would also help, perhaps 4G.

To recap, use these additional settings:

[mysqld]
innodb_io_capacity=5000
innodb_buffer_pool_size=4G
innodb_log_file_size=1G

After adding these settings to my.cnf, to resize ib_logfile0/ib_logfile1 do the following

service mysql stop
rm -f /var/log/mysql/ib_logfile[01]
service mysql start

The files ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 are recreated. Don't worry, I have done this many times.

You may have to do something out of the ordinary for InnoDB

Try the following:

• Full Table Lock on the InnoDB table
• Perform the Bulk Load
• Release the Lock