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Percona and Mad Mimi's MySQL Optimizations

Recently, Mad Mimi's email and interface speed has decreased across the board somewhat, and some people have been asking about it.

So, here's the skinny on the speed.

Mad Mimi in in April, was sending around 1 million emails a day. September, the beginning, we were sending 3 million a day. One month later - as in, today - we're sending over 6 million. This means our database is ballooning quite fast, and although we've substantially scaled all our hardware, we've reached a point at which hardware is limited.

We've had Percona (the very best database consultancy in the world) in all week, specifically Piotr Biel and Maciej Dobrzanski, and we are retaining them to scale and optimize our database architecture primarily by implementing replication and sharding which will make our database scalable and fast.

We're hoping Percona will complete the optimizations the end of next week, and every day we've been rolling out smaller optimizations, and today we're updating our stored procedures. As of yesterday, we've seen significant enhancements in speed.

We expect dramatic improvements by the end of next week, at which time we'll all be sailing. :)

Please be assured, we're sparing no expense and no effort in handling this with as much elegance as is possible. We appreciate the support and patience of all our beautiful customers who we love. :-)

Gary

Mad Mimi's CEO and Founder

Posted by Mad Mimi 

Comments (8)

Oct 28, 2009
Marius said...
If you cannot deal with so many emails please stop selling the service for this period of time because it's affecting all of your current clients. I hope you will fix this problem as you say in a timely manner, but i suggest delaying any future clients until you fix the issue.
Oct 28, 2009
Bill said...
Thanks Gary for letting us know what's going on. Being able to send out 6million a day & growing is fantastic. Most people don't understand what kind of server load that is - I do & hat's off to you for being proactive on the matter. That's what we expect from MadMimi - simple, yet powerful capabilities with lots of flexibility built in. Cheers ...
Oct 28, 2009
Mad Mimi said...
Hey Marius,
I hear your frustration. Mad Mimi is still very much functioning - and for the most part, very well. We have had a drop in mailing speed, which to many users - is not a problem. Most users in fact - are within a speed range where this does not affect them - which is the range of between one to two emails per second. Our larger sender who were sending out at over 30 emails a second are currently sending slower, and mid-sized senders who were sending at about 6 emails per second, are currently at around 3 emails per second. We are very close to a resolution, and I will update you guys!
Oct 28, 2009
Mad Mimi said...
Hey Bill!
Thanks for the good vibes. Mimi's definitely churning an unbelievable load. We have over 50GB of binary data in the DB right now, so it's certainly a monster. :)

Our next step is stabilizing our master/slave config which has crashed multiple times due to a bug in MySQL (Percona's thought). Once we get that up (which we're doing now), we're moving onto flip the slave to a master, roll out some indexes while we avoid downtime and get a sharding going. We're also going to be splitting up our biggest tables and dropping in some new stored procedures.

I'll keep you posted!

Oct 28, 2009
keith said...
Guess my needs aren't as demanding as others, I did notice the wheels spinning a little slower but I didn't really pay attention to the sending rate. And when I looked again it was all done.

Amazing rate of growth you've got going.

Oct 28, 2009
Mad Mimi said...
Hey Keith,
That wheel will be spinning faster than ever in a few days. :-) Can't wait for that. Seriously, the save-load time is going to be whipped into shape whether it likes it or not.
Oct 28, 2009
Vicki said...
WOW! I am so amazed at how much you guys have grown since I joined up.
Oct 28, 2009
Mad Mimi said...
Hey Vicki,
The challenges of scaling are actually pretty fun. Expensive, but technically very exciting. We're currently training several new support staff, and are planning on rolling out phone support pretty soon.

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