Posted on

Luxbet, MariaDB and Melbourne Cup

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day in Australia – the biggest annual horse race event in the country, and in the state of Victoria it’s even a public holiday.

Open Query does work for Luxbet (part of Tabcorp), and Melbourne Cup day is by far their biggest day of the year in terms of traffic. It’s not just a big spike, there’s orders of magnitude difference so you can really say that the rest of the year is downright quiet (in relative terms). So, a very interesting load pattern.

Since last year Luxbet has upgraded from stock MySQL to MariaDB, and with our input made some other infrastructure modifications including moving to a pure solid state storage (FusionIO) solution as a SAN just won’t deliver the resilience and performance required. This may seem odd, but remember that a) a SAN is also a single point of failure (so when the SAN fails, multiple db servers will be “out” – not desirable even though a failover to another datacenter is possible), and b) MariaDB/XtraDB (InnoDB) already have all recent data and indexes in RAM, so whatever I/O is required won’t benefit from a SAN cache. Thus, the SAN will have to actually do a physical disk seek and read to get what is needed, and we all know seeks are slow. A write or fsync also incurs some latency, regardless of the storage array speed.

So those are the reasons for the local storage solution. While there are aspects of RAID and other redundancy in that setup, the main resilience in the infrastructure comes from having more machines, rather than necessarily having more redundancy in each machine.

Grant is working on a more comprehensive version of this story.

Posted on