Question about MySql Server performance

[Tony Elsmore]

Let's say we have on instance of MySQL on our server, with 3 schemas. We have a web service that will be processing a filestream and inserting rows into the database in the process. This takes about 40 minutes because it's adding over 1 million rows when it does this.

Here's my question. The process takes about 40 minutes for 1 file to be read and 1 million rows to be inserted into 1 schema. What if I wanted to process 3 of these files at once, but on separate schemas? Would it take three times as long?

My purpose for asking the question is that we want to determine where the bottleneck is in our process and design our code accordingly. We will have a queue of these processes lining up. We can either run 1 at a time per server, or one at a time per database. We don't want to run 1 at a time per database if it's going to slow each of these down. In other words, we'd rather have 1 take 40 minutes and start the next than to have them all run simultaneously and take 120 min before any are finished.

While running this process, the processor and memory have plenty available, so my first thought is that the hard drive is really the bottle neck here, and therefore, 3 of these processes running on the same server would slow each other down. Is that correct?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/12/2012 02:22PM by Tony Elsmore.