barracuda vs Antelope for innodb

[rahul286]

Hello All,

We recently switched to Percona SQL.

After moving first server, we noticed that it has very optimized configuration out of the box except innodb_file_format is set to “Antelope”.

I believe that barracuda is newer and may be better. But I used to think compression storage will save disk-space at the cost of CPU-cycles.

So which “innodb_file_format” is recommended?

We need to stick to one as we are planning to move more than a dozen setups this weekend.

Thanks.

[przemek]

Using Barracuda format does not mean you will use compression automatically. The ROW_FORMAT can be either dynamic or compressed.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-dynamic.html
Also compressed tables feature is improved in MySQL 5.6 - https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb_compression_improvements_in_mysql

Whether you will benefit from Barracuda or not depends on your data and workload. You can get some idea from this article:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/04/23/real-life-use-case-for-barracuda-innodb-file-format/

[rahul286]

@przemek

Thanks for your answer and helpful links.

For now, I am sticking to defaults.

If goal of compression is to save some disk space at the cost of CPU overhead in compression work, it is not useful in our case.

[przemek]

Rahul, regarding compression you may find this fresh new blog post interesting: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/29/considering-tokudb-as-an-engine-for-timeseries-data/
As seen there, compression overhead in InnoDB is pretty significant while tokuDB does that much better.