Case Study: U-Next achieves scalable, high-performance database operations with PingCAP TiDB

Running a Scale-Out Database on ARM as a MySQL Alternative

U-Next, a major subscription video streaming platform in Japan, needed a database upgrade because its MySQL-based architecture was difficult to scale, suffered from high latency under concurrency, and relied on a poorly maintained proxy layer. The company also wanted a highly available, horizontally scalable solution that would require minimal application changes and fit its existing ARM-based infrastructure.

PingCAP provided TiDB, a distributed SQL database compatible with MySQL and verified on ARM. U-Next migrated its workload to TiDB and tuned the deployment for ARM by disabling Transparent HugePages and applying NUMA binding. The results were significant: peak-hour slow requests dropped from as many as 6,000 to fewer than 600, a 10x improvement, and performance on ARM was nearly the same as on x86 after tuning.

U-Next

Birong Huang

Senior Engineer