Simple Yet Effective MariaDB Tweaks To Increase Your Server's Performance

Over 53,000 live websites use MariaDB, making it the third largest database management system in terms of market share, according to Web Tech Survey.

Thanks to its ease of use, greater performance potential, and easy integration with other database management systems, it’s been a popular choice for databases since it was created in 2009.

While MySQL is ultimately more popular because it’s been around for longer, MariaDB is well on the way to overtaking it for a number of reasons, the most prominent one being its bigger potential to keep improving.

But unlocking its potential requires you to know how to tweak it based on your needs. Let’s explore some of the most basic yet effective ways you can do that.

Optimizing Your Connections

The first thing you can do to get the best efficiency out of your MariaDB server is to ensure that it’s supporting the optimal amount of connections.

The number of connections you can support without experiencing slowdowns is limited by available CPU and memory. Too many connections will use up all of your resources and slow down the server.

In order to limit the maximum connections and thus preserve server performance, you can reduce the maximum number of connections.

Conversely, to increase connection capacity and allow more clients to access the server, you can increase the number of max connections, provided that you have the resources.

Keep in mind that getting a “too many connections” error is usually a sign that there are server inefficiencies such as slow querying.

Alternatively, you can also decrease the timeout parameter for idle connections to allow other clients to connect sooner.

Memory Tweaks and Tuneups

One of the biggest things you can do to streamline your MariaDB server is to make it use memory resources effectively. The relevant parameters here are buffer pool size, memory table size and max heap table size.

Buffer pool size determines how much RAM is allotted to caching and indexing data for faster access. Max heap table size controls the RAM allocated to temporary tables created by users.

Index-related statements, such as MariaDB rename index and join buffer size are also powerful tools to ensure that your server is handling data at peak performance.

Indexing is exceedingly important to the proper operation of a server because they provide fast access to data that’s being searched or queried. Without it, the server will have to search through the entire database to find the needed data.

File System Streamlining

Changes to the database are ultimately committed to the disk file system, and thus too many disk operations are going to slow down the server just as much as insufficient RAM or processing power would.

One of the first things you can do is to raise the open files limit, to accommodate operations in more active databases. Individual files, as well as logs and client connections all take up file descriptors, and thus this must be raised for higher-activity servers.

Other things you can do include compressing tables and defragging the file system. You can also increase the maximum log file size, to enable it to log more information before needing to write to disk, reducing the amount of I/O operations.

If your MariaDB server is experiencing performance troubles, try out these tweaks first before doing anything more complicated.

You might be surprised how easily you can resolve your issues, and even gain a bigger performance boost than you expected.