MySQL Thread Pool: Scalability solution

When implementing a thread pool or any other means of limiting concurrency in the MySQL Server, careful thought is required about how to divide the problem to ensure that we don't create any unnecessary new hot spots. It is very easy to make a design that manages all connections and threads in one pool. This design does however very quickly run into scalability issues due to the need to lock the common data structures every time a connection or thread needs to change its state.

To avoid this issue we decided to implement the thread pool using a set of thread groups. Each of those thread groups are independent of the other thread groups. Each thread group manages a set of connections and threads. It also handles a set of queues and other data structures required to implement the thread group operations. Each thread group will contain a minimum of one thread, connections will be bound to a thread group at connect time using a simple round robin assignment. The thread pool aims to ensure that each thread group either has zero or one thread actively executing a statement. This means that the interactions between threads within one thread group is extremely limited. Also the interactions won't grow as the MySQL Server gets more statements to process. Thus it is very hard to see this model become a scalability issue in itself.

So we solved the scalability problem using a Divide-and-Conquer technique.
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