MySQL 5.7 Release Notes
Making your log files very large may reduce disk I/O during checkpointing. It often makes sense to set the total size of the log files as large as the buffer pool or even larger. Although in the past large log files could make crash recovery take excessive time, starting with MySQL 5.5, performance enhancements to crash recovery make it possible to use large log files with fast startup after a crash. (Strictly speaking, this performance improvement is available for MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin 1.0.7 and higher. It is with MySQL 5.5 that this improvement is available in the default InnoDB storage engine.)
How Checkpoint Processing Works
InnoDB implements a
checkpoint mechanism known
as fuzzy
checkpointing. InnoDB flushes modified
database pages from the buffer pool in small batches. There is no
need to flush the buffer pool in one single batch, which would
disrupt processing of user SQL statements during the checkpointing
process.
During crash recovery,
InnoDB looks for a checkpoint label written to
the log files. It knows that all modifications to the database
before the label are present in the disk image of the database.
Then InnoDB scans the log files forward from
the checkpoint, applying the logged modifications to the database.