With Intel QuickAssist Technology, you can see a 5x performance in your MariaBackup compression, and lower CPU usage as well. Today I’m going to

Accelerating MariaBackup with Intel QuickAssist

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2024-11-19 17:30:05

With Intel QuickAssist Technology, you can see a 5x performance in your MariaBackup compression, and lower CPU usage as well. Today I’m going to show you how.

Nearly a decade ago, Intel released a technology called QuickAssist, which started out as a PCI-e card and then became integrated in many Xeon processes starting with the Skylake generation. QuickAssist Technology (often called QAT) is a special unit that the CPU can offload compression and encryption tasks onto.

I was lucky enough to have early access to this technology back when it was new. Back then, I was assisting Intel port the technology to work with NGINX. The technology had some very impressive capabilities at the time, so I am delighted to see it used in a MariaDB context today.

A typical use case for MariaBackup is to stream the output and pipe it through a compression utility. This is especially true in later MariaDB versions because the --compress option is deprecated. So, for example, you could do:

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