Re: What is InnoDB Reading and Writing when It's Idle?

[Peter Brawley]

An RDBMS does a lot more than just react to user input. It's pretty well documented at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-storage-engine.html, you might be most interested in ...

14.3 InnoDB Multi-Versioning
14.4 InnoDB Architecture
14.5 InnoDB In-Memory Structures
14.6 InnoDB On-Disk Structures
14.8 InnoDB Configuration
14.9 InnoDB Table Compression
14.10 InnoDB File-Format Management
14.12 InnoDB Disk I/O and File Space Management
14.13 InnoDB and Online DDL
14.15 InnoDB INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables
14.16 InnoDB Integration with MySQL Performance Schema
14.17 InnoDB Monitors