May 26, 2013

New Presentations published (Meetup and Highload)

We have finally found the time to update out presentation pages – we’ve added the presentation on MySQL Scaling by Sharding and Replication as well as Russian Language presentations I’ve given at HighLoad++ conference back in October. Innodb Scalability and New Features (Russian), Scaling MySQL-powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication (Russian), Wonderful World of [...]

Recovering Innodb table Corruption

Assume you’re running MySQL with Innodb tables and you’ve got crappy hardware, driver bug, kernel bug, unlucky power failure or some rare MySQL bug and some pages in Innodb tablespace got corrupted. In such cases Innodb will typically print something like this: InnoDB: Database page corruption on disk or a failed InnoDB: file read of [...]

Economics of Performance Optimization

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]

Hacking to make ALTER TABLE online for certain changes

Suppose you want to remove auto_increment from 100G table. No matter if it’s InnoDB or MyISAM, you’d usually ALTER TABLE huge_table CHANGE id id int(6) NOT NULL and then wait hours for table rebuild to complete. If you’re unlucky i.e. you have a lot of indexes and not too much RAM – you could end [...]

Traffic Tricks by Hosting Providers.

I already wrote once about hosting troubles which we had with this site a while back. Today we had another trouble to one of the European hit servers for ClickAider project. We had purchased this 1and1 server few months ago, before we were running into troubles and as it was running well and because we [...]

Using GROUP BY WITH ROLLUP for Reporting Performance Optimization

Quite typical query for reporting applications is to find top X values. If you analyze Web Site logs you would look at most popular web pages or search engine keywords which bring you most of the traffic. If you’re looking at ecommerce reporting you may be interested in best selling product or top sales people. [...]

Site was down today, support and web hosting.

During last one and a half year we had pretty good track record with MySQL Performance Blog – there were times when site was slow (especially when backup was running) but I do not remember significant downtime, until today we went down for few hours. All this time the site was running on dedicated server [...]

What exactly is read_rnd_buffer_size

Looking for documentation for read_rnd_buffer_size you would find descriptions such as “The read_rnd_buffer_size is used after a sort, when reading rows in sorted order. If you use many queries with ORDER BY, upping this can improve performance” which is cool but it does not really tell you how exactly read_rnd_buffer_size works as well as which [...]

Why Index could refuse to work ?

Have you ever seen index which refused to be used even if there is every reason for it to work (from the glance view):

Why on the earth index would not be used you would think, even if MySQL is mentioning it in “possible keys” ? Should you try to force it ?

What MySQL buffer cache hit rate should you target

“What cache hit rate is good for optimal MySQL Performance” is typical question I’m asked. It could by MyISAM key_buffer or Innodb innodb_buffer_pool it does not really matter. In both cases trying to come up with constant “good” hit rate is looking for trouble. Well of course you can name 100% hit rate and all [...]