The problem that I  have is that data are being written to the FIFO at a fast rate. In order to be able to keep up, at any given time my application reads the data available at the FIFO, and spawns a thread to process the chunk of data just read. It is in this thread that all the database interaction takes place.  In order to deal with this, I have the following entries in my /etc/my.cnf file:

# this is read by the standalone daemon and embedded servers
[server]

# this is only for the mysqld standalone daemon
[mysqld]
# thread_handling=pool-of-threads
# log=/var/log/mysqld.log

# this is only for embedded server
[embedded]

# This group is only read by MariaDB servers, not by MySQL.
# If you use the same .cnf file for MySQL and MariaDB,
# you can put MariaDB-only options here
[mariadb]
# log=/var/log/mysqld.log
general_log_file        = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.log
# general_log             = 1

# transaction-isolation = READ-COMMITTED
# key_buffer = 1280M                              # 128MB for every 1GB of RAM
# sort_buffer_size =  1M                          # 1MB for every 1GB of RAM
# read_buffer_size = 1M                           # 1MB for every 1GB of RAM
# read_rnd_buffer_size = 1M                       # 1MB for every 1GB of RAM
# thread_concurrency = 24                         # Based on the number of CPUs
                                                  # so make it CPU*2
# thread-handling=pool-of-threads
# innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit != 1
# open_files_limit = 50000

thread-handling=pool-of-threads
max_connections = 1000
table_open_cache = 800
query_cache_type = 0
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 10
innodb_adaptive_hash_index_partitions = 20
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 5000

With this, my application can keep up with the FIFO writer, but - depending on the circumstances - my database can't. As I am writing this, there are over 1300 threads connected to my database; any command that I issue at the mysql CLI takes over one minute to return. I am keeping track on how long each thread takes to complete, and that is of the order of hundreds of seconds - sometimes thousands. Each thread is itself simple, in that it just issues a couple of simple MariaDB commands.  Currently my table consists of 1.6 million entries, and growing - on this basis, I expect that things will get only worse. Each entry,however, will never require more than a couple of hundred bytes of storage. The operations that can be undertaken on entries are insertion, deletion and modification, the latter being straightforward - like e.g. incrementing a counter or replacing a short string.

My system has 24 GB of  RAM and 12 cores. Occasionally all the cores are fully busy with MariaDB activity, but most of the time barely one or two are.

I am a newbie when it comes to interacting with MariaDB - please,  bear with me. I know I must use a single database and a single table. I also know - because of the nature of the data that are being written to the FIFO - that the  probability for two different threads to be operating on the same entry in the table at the same time is negligible - i.e. for all practical purposes, that will not happen.

What I need is advice on how to configure my instance of MariaDB to perform optimally in the scenario above. In particular, I would like for it to make better use of all the cores available - in essence, to parallelize the database operations as much as possible.

Feedback from the experts will be much appreciated.