LinuxQuestions.org - MySQL help with huge database

Hi,

I am looking for ways to improve the database performance in the situation when I have to modify a large table (several million rows), by e.g. adding a column. Currently this would take several hours which is too slow. The bottleneck is disk I/O. I am considering either partitioning the table over several innodb files on several disks, or going to a RAID-5 or RAID-10, it this will give me better write performance.

The database is 130GB large, and the problem table (which I make period changes to) is the largest table on the server. I cannot have downtime of 3 hours each time I make a change and adding blank fields (to be used later, when a new field is needed) is not an option.

Each time I add a column, the cpu goes into high (80%) io wait state for about 3 hours.

I have a hack which would allow me to split the large table into multiple smaller tables based on some criteria (for example, forumID or such). Here are a couple of things but would like to know which is best, and am open to new ideas. The ideas so far:

1. Split the table into 3 or 5 smaller tables each on it's own disk. The disk IO would then not be so bad, and it might only take 1 hour to perform the table change. But this might not work because the changes to the database (as in adding a column) might be serial, meaning only 1 disk is being written to at a time. (Then again, maybe it will work if I launch 3 different scripts, one to update each table at once).

2. Do RAID 5 or 10, and have 3 or 5 disks. This again might not help at all because of the above issue with MySQL writing serially.

Any ideas here on these, or any new ideas?

I am using latest MySQL 5.0.45 with InnoDB engine on Debian etch Linux

Please help

Thanks