How big can a MySQL database get before performance starts to degrade

Question

At what point does a MySQL database start to lose performance    Does physical database size matter  Do number of records matter  Is any performance degradation linear or exponential    I have what I believe to be a large database  with roughly 15M records which take up almost 2GB  Based on these numbers  is there any incentive for me to clean the data out  or am I safe to allow it to continue scaling for a few more years

User · Answer

A point to consider is also the purpose of the system and the data in the day to day.

For example, for a system with GPS monitoring of cars is not relevant query data from the positions of the car in previous months.

Therefore the data can be passed to other historical tables for possible consultation and reduce the execution times of the day to day queries.

User · Answer

2GB and about 15M records is a very small database - I ve run much bigger ones on a pentium III    and everything has still run pretty fast   If yours is slow it is a database application design problem  not a mysql one

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Performance can degrade in a matter of few thousand rows if database is not designed properly    If you have proper indexes  use proper engines  don t use MyISAM where multiple DMLs are expected   use partitioning  allocate correct memory depending on the use and of course have good server configuration  MySQL can handle data even in terabytes   There are always ways to improve the database performance

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I would focus first on your indexes  than have a server admin look at your OS  and if all that doesn t help it might be time for a master slave configuration    That s true  Another thing that usually works is to just reduce the quantity of data that s repeatedly worked with  If you have  old data  and  new data  and 99  of your queries work with new data  just move all the old data to another table - and don t look at it     -  Have a look at partitioning

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It depends on your query and validation    For example  i worked with a table of 100 000 drugs which has a column generic name where it has more than 15 characters for each drug in that table  I put a query to compare the generic name of drugs between two tables The query takes more minutes to run The Same if you compare the drugs using the drug index using an id column  as said above   it takes only few seconds

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I once was called upon to look at a mysql that had  stopped working    I discovered that the DB files were residing on a Network Appliance filer mounted with NFS2 and with a maximum file size of 2GB   And sure enough  the table that had stopped accepting transactions was exactly 2GB on disk   But with regards to the performance curve I m told that it was working like a champ right up until it didn t work at all   This experience always serves for me as a nice reminder that there re always dimensions above and below the one you naturally suspect

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Database size DOES matter in terms of bytes and table s rows number  You will notice a huge performance difference between a light database and a blob filled one  Once my application got stuck because I put binary images inside fields instead of keeping images in files on the disk and putting only file names in database  Iterating a large number of rows on the other hand is not for free

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The physical database size doesn t matter   The number of records don t matter   In my experience the biggest problem that you are going to run in to is not size  but the number of queries you can handle at a time   Most likely you are going to have to move to a master slave configuration so that the read queries can run against the slaves and the write queries run against the master   However if you are not ready for this yet  you can always tweak your indexes for the queries you are running to speed up the response times   Also there is a lot of tweaking you can do to the network stack and kernel in Linux that will help   I have had mine get up to 10GB  with only a moderate number of connections and it handled the requests just fine   I would focus first on your indexes  then have a server admin look at your OS  and if all that doesn t help it might be time to implement a master slave configuration

User · Answer

It s kind of pointless to talk about  database performance    query performance  is a better term here  And the answer is  it depends on the query  data that it operates on  indexes  hardware  etc  You can get an idea of how many rows are going to be scanned and what indexes are going to be used with EXPLAIN syntax    2GB does not really count as a  large  database - it s more of a medium size

User · Answer

No it doesnt really matter  The MySQL speed is about 7 Million rows per second  So you can scale it quite a bit

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The database size does matter  If you have more than one table with more than a million records  then performance starts indeed to degrade  The number of records does of course affect the performance  MySQL can be slow with large tables  If you hit one million records you will get performance problems if the indices are not set right  for example no indices for fields in  WHERE statements  or  ON conditions  in joins   If you hit 10 million records  you will start to get performance problems even if you have all your indices right  Hardware upgrades - adding more memory and more processor power  especially memory - often help to reduce the most severe problems by increasing the performance again  at least to a certain degree   For example 37 signals went from 32 GB RAM to 128GB of RAM for the Basecamp database server

User · Answer

In general this is a very subtle issue and not trivial whatsoever  I encourage you to read mysqlperformanceblog com and High Performance MySQL  I really think there is no general answer for this   I m working on a project which has a MySQL database with almost 1TB of data  The most important scalability factor is RAM  If the indexes of your tables fit into memory and your queries are highly optimized  you can serve a reasonable amount of requests with a average machine    The number of records do matter  depending of how your tables look like  It s a difference to have a lot of varchar fields or only a couple of ints or longs   The physical size of the database matters as well  think of backups  for instance  Depending on your engine  your physical db files on grow  but don t shrink  for instance with innodb  So deleting a lot of rows  doesn t help to shrink your physical files   There s a lot to this issues and as in a lot of cases the devil is in the details

User · Answer

I m currently managing a MySQL database on Amazon s cloud infrastructure that has grown to 160 GB   Query performance is fine   What has become a nightmare is backups  restores  adding slaves  or anything else that deals with the whole dataset  or even DDL on large tables   Getting a clean import of a dump file has become problematic   In order to make the process stable enough to automate  various choices needed to be made to prioritize stability over performance   If we ever had to recover from a disaster using a SQL backup  we d be down for days  Horizontally scaling SQL is also pretty painful  and in most cases leads to using it in ways you probably did not intend when you chose to put your data in SQL in the first place   Shards  read slaves  multi-master  et al  they are all really shitty solutions that add complexity to everything you ever do with the DB  and not one of them solves the problem  only mitigates it in some ways   I would strongly suggest looking at moving some of your data out of MySQL  or really any SQL  when you start approaching a dataset of a size where these types of things become an issue  Update  a few years later  and our dataset has grown to about 800 GiB   In addition  we have a single table which is 200  GiB and a few others in the 50-100 GiB range   Everything I said before holds   It still performs just fine  but the problems of running full dataset operations have become worse

User · Answer

Also watch out for complex joins   Transaction complexity can be a big factor in addition to transaction volume   Refactoring heavy queries sometimes offers a big performance boost

User · Answer

Query performance mainly depends on the number of records it needs to scan  indexes plays a high role in it and index data size is proportional to number of rows and number of indexes   Queries with indexed field conditions along with full value would be returned in 1ms generally  but starts with  IN  Between  obviously contains conditions might take more time with more records to scan     Also you will face lot of maintenance issues with DDL  like ALTER  DROP will be slow and difficult with more live traffic even for adding a index or new columns   Generally its advisable to cluster the Database into as many clusters as required  500GB would be a general benchmark  as said by others it depends on many factors and can vary based on use cases  that way it gives better isolation and gives independence to scale specific clusters  more suited in case of B2B

[mysql] How big can a MySQL database get before performance starts to degrade

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