# barracuda vs Antelope for innodb

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898>\
**Category:** Other MySQL® Questions\
**Created:** [August 22, 2013, 8:23am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898 "2013-08-22T08:23:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![rahul286](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d78d45/32.png) [@rahul286](https://forums.percona.com/u/rahul286)\
**Post date:** [August 22, 2013, 8:23am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898/1 "2013-08-22T08:23:28Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![przemek](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/przemek/32/3_2.png) [@przemek](https://forums.percona.com/u/przemek)\
**Post date:** [August 22, 2013, 8:54am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898/2 "2013-08-22T08:54:58Z")

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Using Barracuda format does not mean you will use compression automatically. The ROW\_FORMAT can be either dynamic or compressed.  
[URL][http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-dynamic.html[/URL]](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-row-format-dynamic.html%5B/URL%5D)  
Also compressed tables feature is improved in MySQL 5.6 - [URL][https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb\_compression\_improvements\_in\_mysql[/URL]](https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb_compression_improvements_in_mysql%5B/URL%5D)

Whether you will benefit from Barracuda or not depends on your data and workload. You can get some idea from this article:  
[URL][http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/04/23/real-life-use-case-for-barracuda-innodb-file-format/[/URL]](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/04/23/real-life-use-case-for-barracuda-innodb-file-format/%5B/URL%5D)

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**Author:** ![rahul286](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d78d45/32.png) [@rahul286](https://forums.percona.com/u/rahul286)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2013, 4:18am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898/3 "2013-08-24T04:18:01Z")

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@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.

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**Author:** ![przemek](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/przemek/32/3_2.png) [@przemek](https://forums.percona.com/u/przemek)\
**Post date:** [August 29, 2013, 12:36pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/barracuda-vs-antelope-for-innodb/2898/4 "2013-08-29T12:36:05Z")

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Rahul, regarding compression you may find this fresh new blog post interesting: [url][http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/29/considering-tokudb-as-an-engine-for-timeseries-data/[/url]](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/29/considering-tokudb-as-an-engine-for-timeseries-data/%5B/url%5D)  
As seen there, compression overhead in InnoDB is pretty significant while tokuDB does that much better.