Power8 and Maria DB 10.1: what a great meeting!

It is a 12-core CPU, each of which can manage 8 threads simultaneously (for a total of 96 threads) with frequencies from 2.5GHz to 5GHz. When asked for the configuration for the test, we chose to use 2 VMs with PowerKVM and RedHat 7 installed on both, with 4 cores and 4GB of RAM each.

On one VM we installed MariaDB 10.1.3, which is not yet available for the production environment, but of which a branch specifically addressed to this platform has been created for maximum performance and on the other Zend Server for the PHP part.

For both installations there were no problems whatsoever and we started a test on the database part, a brief check on the configuration part (memory for Innodb, cache tables, type of disk access) and here we are ready to go.

Loading the dump of various of our databases occurred without problems.

I was curious to try some of the new features of MariaDB 10.1 (for further information I recommend you consult the Knowledge Base of MariaDB 10.1 which is slowly growing): one was the defragmentation of the InnoDB tables without creating intermediate tables and burdening the ibdata and then the function to set the maximum time for a query which is also present in Mysql 5.7.4, but which, in MariaDB allows it to be applied to any statement (while in Mysql only on select).

Everything works as expected and very quickly too thanks to Power8! ;)

Now we are deciding which PHP application to load in order to test all 2 VMs with "something real".