Case Study: F5 Networks achieves 1000% performance improvement with MySQL

F5Relies on MySQL to Improve Performance 1000%

F5, a market leader in Application Delivery Controllers, needed to add a real-time Performance Monitoring Module (PMM) to its Enterprise Manager appliance but faced a major storage and throughput constraint: the purpose-built appliance had a single disk and ~50 GB capacity (no RAID), yet PMM had to ingest tens of millions of new records daily and purge old data fast enough to keep the complex schema usable.

The team solved this by using MySQL 5.1 partitioning, pairing MyISAM for high-speed inserts with InnoDB for transactional queries, and partitioning data by timestamp so entire partitions could be dropped instead of deleting rows. The change boosted insert throughput from about 3,500 records/sec to 22,000 records/sec (a 6x gain) and about 10x versus pre-partitioning levels, simplified administration, avoided custom storage-engine work, and made PMM viable for larger customers.

F5 Networks

Bruce Butterfield

Development Manager