How To Tune MariaDB Write Performance

This article describes how I tuned MariaDB to give the best write throughput with SSD based storage.
When you have a write-heavy application writing into InnoDB, you will probably experience the InnoDB Checkpoint Blues. The effect manifests as stalls – short periods of time where the troughput falls to zero and I/O activity goes crazy. The phenomenon is well known and described i.e. here. More background about checkpointing can be found here.
The XtraDB fork of the InnoDB engine (and heart of Percona Server) contains some patches with the goal to overcome this odd behavior. MariaDB uses XtraDB as default InnoDB implementation, so we can configure some extra variables and hopefully avoid the checkpoint blues.
The first and most important setting is innodb_io_capacity. This is the approximate number of write operations that your hardware can do. If you don’t know that number, then you can easily find it out. Wait until you experience a stall and run iostat -x. You should see fairly high numbers for wrqm/s and w/s on the device holding your InnoDB table spaces. W/s is the number of write requests that hit the device, wrqm/s is the number of requests that could be merged. The sum of both is what InnoDB was effectively using.

http://blog.montyprogram.com/how-to-tune-mariadb-write-performance/