How do you profile and optimize Mnesia transaction throughput in a write-heavy system?

Profiling starts with identifying where time is actually going: lock contention on specific records/tables, replication coordination overhead across nodes, or transaction log dump frequency — each has a different fix.

1. Check for hot records/tables via tracing or by inspecting which transactions are waiting on locks (mnesia:info/0 shows waiting processes); shard or restructure data that's contended.
2. Reconsider replication scope — does every node really need a full copy of this table, or would fragmentation or fewer replicas reduce coordination overhead per write?
3. Batch related writes into a single transaction instead of many small ones, amortizing per-transaction overhead across more work.
4. Reach for dirty operations selectively, for the specific subset of writes where strict consistency genuinely isn't required.
5. Tune dc_dump_limit if disc_copies write overhead from frequent log dumps is a measurable factor.

The common thread: throughput problems in Mnesia are almost always about contention or coordination overhead specifically, not raw CPU, so profiling should aim squarely at finding which of those is the actual bottleneck before reaching for a fix.

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