Case Study: Big Fish Games triples database performance with MySQL Query Analyzer

Big Fish Games Triples Database Performance with MySQL Query Analyzer

Big Fish Games is a global leader in casual online and downloadable games, serving millions of downloads daily and managing over 25 million customer accounts across multiple international sites. Rapid growth created a major IT challenge: accurately predicting demand and tuning the database to avoid slowdowns or wasted capacity, especially when poorly written SQL could silently degrade performance.

Big Fish deployed MySQL at scale (40 production servers with replication and DRBD), added Memcached and Sun x64 servers, and implemented MySQL Query Analyzer and MySQL Enterprise Monitor to pinpoint SQL issues and monitor capacity. The Query Analyzer exposed a bad query that ran 400,000 times overnight, enabling fixes that tripled database performance in three days, while the monitoring tools improved capacity planning and let a small DBA team reliably manage dozens of servers.

Big Fish

Keith Souhrada

Software Development Engineer