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

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?

Ive got (what I believe to be) a large database, almost 2GB and about 15M records. Should I be cleaning this out, or am I OK for another few years?

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Question by (8/4/2008 2:31:11 PM)

Answer

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 kernal in Linux that will help.

I have had mine get up to 10G, with only a moderate number of connections and it handled the requests just fine.

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.

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