Today I worked on rather interesting customer problem. Site was subject what was considered DDOS and solution was implemented to protect from it. However in addition to banning the intruders IPs it banned IPs of web services which were very actively used by the application which caused even worse problems by consuming all apache slots [...]
MySQL Replication vs DRBD Battles
Well these days we see a lot of post for and against (more, more) using of MySQL and DRBD as a high availability practice. I personally think DRBD has its place but there are far more cases when other techniques would work much better for variety of reasons. First let me start with Florian’s comments [...]
How multiple disks can benefit for single client workload ?
Let us talk few more about disks. You might have read my previous post and Matt’s Reply and it looks like there are few more things to clarify and explain. Before I get to main topic of the article lets comment on IO vs Disk question. If you look at Disk Based databases all data [...]
TPC-H Run on MySQL 5.1 and 6.0
We were doing MySQL Performance evaluation on TPC-H queries for the client and they kindly allowed us to publish results which are very interesting. This is obviously not audited TPC-H run, and it can’t be because we used MyISAM tables which are not ACID complaint. Plus we only measured Power to keep things simple. We [...]
Pitfall of proxying HTTP requests through Lighttpd
Recently I had a case with a web server farm where a random node went down every few minutes. I don’t mean any of them rebooted except once or twice, but rather they were slowing down so much that practically stopped serving any requests and were being pulled out from the LVS cluster. The traffic [...]
Heikki Tuuri answers to Innodb questions, Part II
I now got answers to the second portions of the questions you asked Heikki. If you have not seen the first part it can be found here. Same as during last time I will provide my comments for some of the answers under PZ and will use HT for original Heikkis answer. Q26: You also [...]
Choosing innodb_buffer_pool_size
My last post about Innodb Performance Optimization got a lot of comments choosing proper innodb_buffer_pool_size and indeed I oversimplified things a bit too much, so let me write a bit better description. Innodb Buffer Pool is by far the most important option for Innodb Performance and it must be set correctly. I’ve seen a lot [...]
MySQL Stored Procedures problems and use practices
To be honest I’m not a big fan of Stored Procedures, At least not in the form they are currently implemented in MySQL 5.0 Only SQL as a Language Which is ancient ugly for algorithmic programming and slow. It is also forces you to use a lot of foreign constructs to “original” MySQL style – [...]
PHP Sessions – Files vs Database Based
One may think changing PHP session handler from file based to database driven is fully transparent. In many cases it is, sometimes however it may cause some unexpected problems as happened to one of our customers. If you use file based sessions PHP will lock session file for whole script execution duration, which means all [...]
Watch out for Marketing benchmarks
Whenever I see benchmark results I try to understand if it is technical benchmark – made by people seeking the truth or it is done by Marketing department to wash your brains. Watch out. Whenever you treat marketing benchmarks as technical ones, you make make wrong decision. Take a look at MySQL 5.0 Benchmarks Whitepaper [...]

