OLX Serves 40 Million Page-Views a Day with MariaDB

OLX is an international free classifieds directory with more than 40 million pages views per day. Hosted at Rackspace, it has been used on popular social networking sites like Hi5 and Friendster. Binlogic started an external DBA consulting task for improving database performance by taking advantage of MariaDB's enhanced features.

OLX runs CentOS 5.5. servers. In the second quarter of 2011, OLX started migration from MySQL to the MariaDB 5.2 series. As a first step, OLX started testing in QA, then moved to staging and developing environments with great results.

The database servers are Dell PowerEdge R710 with 72GB RAM Memory, powered by two quad-core Intel XEON CPUs. For the operating system, there is 2 x 450 GB in RAID 1 running EXT3. For the database, there is 4 x 450 GB in RAID 10 on XFS.

"We started sharding comments and noticed great improvements in performance," says Santiago Lertora of Binlogic.

Features cited for the decision to use MariaDB included enhancements of INFORMATION_SCHEMA for user statistics and the fact that virtual columns can be evaluated. "Stability is a must and MariaDB is working as expected giving an 80% performance gain over the previous MySQL installation," continued Lertora.

OLX is watching further enhancements in MariaDB, and are looking at HandlerSocket for the future.