Two Performance Schema tables provide timer information:

Each timer row in setup_timers must refer to one of the timers listed in performance_timers.

Timers vary in precision and amount of overhead. To see what timers are available and their characteristics, check the performance_timers table:

mysql> SELECT * FROM performance_timers;
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
| TIMER_NAME  | TIMER_FREQUENCY | TIMER_RESOLUTION | TIMER_OVERHEAD |
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
| CYCLE       |      2389029850 |                1 |             72 |
| NANOSECOND  |      1000000000 |                1 |            112 |
| MICROSECOND |         1000000 |                1 |            136 |
| MILLISECOND |            1036 |                1 |            168 |
| TICK        |             105 |                1 |           2416 |
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+

The columns have these meanings:

To see which timer is in effect or to change the timer, access the setup_timers table:

mysql> SELECT * FROM setup_timers;
+------+------------+
| NAME | TIMER_NAME |
+------+------------+
| wait | CYCLE      |
+------+------------+

mysql> UPDATE setup_timers SET TIMER_NAME = 'MICROSECOND'
       WHERE NAME = 'wait';

mysql> SELECT * FROM setup_timers;
+------+-------------+
| NAME | TIMER_NAME  |
+------+-------------+
| wait | MICROSECOND |
+------+-------------+

By default, the Performance Schema uses the best timer available for each instrument type, but you can select a different one. Generally the best timer is CYCLE, which uses the CPU cycle counter whenever possible to provide high precision and low overhead.

The precision offered by the cycle counter depends on processor speed. If the processor runs at 1 GHz (one billion cycles/second) or higher, the cycle counter delivers sub-nanosecond precision. Using the cycle counter is much cheaper than getting the actual time of day. For example, the standard gettimeofday() function can take hundreds of cycles, which is an unacceptable overhead for data gathering that may occur thousands or millions of times per second.

Cycle counters also have disadvantages:

MySQL works with cycle counters on x386 (Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, and other Unix flavors), PowerPC, and IA-64.

Rows in Performance Schema tables that store current events and historical events have three columns to represent timing information: TIMER_START and TIMER_END indicate when the event started and finished, and TIMER_WAIT indicates the event duration.

The setup_instruments table has an ENABLED column to indicate the instruments for which to collect events. The table also has a TIMED column to indicate which instruments are timed. If an instrument is not enabled, it produces no events. If an enabled instrument is not timed, events produced by the instrument have NULL for the TIMER_START, TIMER_END, and TIMER_WAIT timer values. This in turn causes those values to be ignored when calculating the sum, minimum, maximum, and average time values in summary tables.

Within events, times are stored in picoseconds (trillionths of a second) to normalize them to a standard unit, regardless of which timer is selected. The timer used for an event is the one in effect when event timing begins. This timer is used to convert start and end values to picoseconds for storage in the event.

Modifications to the setup_timers table affect monitoring immediately. Events already measured are stored using the original timer unit, and events in progress may use the original timer for the begin time and the new timer for the end time. To avoid unpredictable results if you make timer changes, use TRUNCATE TABLE to reset Performance Schema statistics.

The timer baseline (“time zero”) occurs at Performance Schema initialization during server startup. TIMER_START and TIMER_END values in events represent picoseconds since the baseline. TIMER_WAIT values are durations in picoseconds.

Picosecond values in events are approximate. Their accuracy is subject to the usual forms of error associated with conversion from one unit to another. If the CYCLE timer is used and the processor rate varies, there might be drift. For these reasons, it is not reasonable to look at the TIMER_START value for an event as an accurate measure of time elapsed since server startup. On the other hand, it is reasonable to use TIMER_START or TIMER_WAIT values in ORDER BY clauses to order events by start time or duration.

The choice of picoseconds in events rather than a value such as microseconds has a performance basis. One implementation goal was to show results in a uniform time unit, regardless of the timer. In an ideal world this time unit would look like a wall-clock unit and be reasonably precise; in other words, microseconds. But to convert cycles or nanoseconds to microseconds, it would be necessary to perform a division for every instrumentation. Division is expensive on many platforms. Multiplication is not expensive, so that is what is used. Therefore, the time unit is an integer multiple of the highest possible TIMER_FREQUENCY value, using a multiplier large enough to ensure that there is no major precision loss. The result is that the time unit is “picoseconds.” This precision is spurious, but the decision enables overhead to be minimized.