Do named fifo pipes use disk writes and reads ?

Question

I want to parse MySQL general log and store that information on another server.

I was wondering if it would have a performance increase to have MySQL write its log to a Linux named pipe FIFO instead of just moving the log file and then parsing it.

My goal is to remove the hard disk access and increase the performance of the MySQL server.

This is all done on Linux centos.

So does FIFO use disk access or is everything done in memory?

If I had MySQL write to a FIFO and had a process that ran in memory parsing that information and then have it send to a different server would that save on disk writes?

Also would this be better than storing MySQL general log into a MySQL database. I've noticed that insert statements can add .2 seconds to a script. So I am wondering if I turn on logging for MySQL that its going to add .2 to every query that's ran.

Answer 1

From the fifo(7) man-page:

FIFO special file has no contents on the file system

Whether it is a good idea to use fifo in an attempt to increase MySQL performance is another question.