Hi,
This afternoon, I migrated one of the main production English Wikipedia slaves, db59, to MariaDB 5.5.28. We've previously been testing 5.5.27 on the primary research slave, and I've been testing the current build for the last few days on a slave in eqiad. All has looked good, and I spent the last few days adapting our monitoring and metrics collection tools to the new version, and building binary packages that meet our needs.
A main gotcha in major version upgrades is performance regressions due to changes in query plans. I've seen no sign of this, and my initial assessment is that performance for our workload is on par with or slightly improved over the 5.1 facebook patchset.
Taking the times of 100% of all queries over regular sample windows, the average query time across all enwiki slave queries is about 8% faster with MariaDB vs. our production build of 5.1-fb. Some queries types are 10-15% faster, some are 3% slower, and nothing looks aberrant beyond those bounds. Overall throughput as measured by qps has generally been improved by 2-10%. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from this data yet, more is needed to filter out noise, but it's positive.
MariaDB has some nice performance improvements that our workload doesn't really hit (better query optimization and index usage during joins, much better sub query support) but there are also some things, such as full utilization of the primary key embedded on the right of every secondary index that we can take advantage of (and improve our schema around) once prod is fully upgraded, hopefully over the next 1-2 months.
The main goal of migrating to MariaDB is not performance driven. More so, I think it's in WMF's and the open source communities interest to coalesce around the MariaDB Foundation as the best route to ensuring a truly open and well supported future for mysql derived database technology. Performance gains along the way are icing on the cake.
-Asher