In the last blog post I wrote about how to log deadlock errors using Percona Toolkit. Foreign key errors have the same problems. InnoDB only logs the last error in the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, so we need another similar tool in order to have historical data. pt-fk-error-logger This is a tool very [...]
Logging Deadlock errors
September 19, 2012 By 4 Comments
The principal source of information for InnoDB diagnostics is the output of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS but there are some sections that are not very useful. For example, LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK only shows, as the name implies, the latest error detected. If you have 100 deadlocks per minute you will be able to see only [...]
Write contentions on the query cache
September 5, 2012 By 5 Comments
While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster: Multi-node writing and Unexpected deadlocks
August 17, 2012 By 17 Comments
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) and the technology it uses (Galera) is an exciting alternative to traditional MySQL replication. For those who don’t know, it gives you: Fully Synchronous replication with a write latency increase equivalent to a ping RTT to the furthest node Automatic cluster synchronization, both incremental and full restores The ability to read [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
June 20, 2012 By 63 Comments
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
read_buffer_size can break your replication
June 6, 2012 By 12 Comments
There are some variables that can affect the replication behavior and sometimes cause some big troubles. In this post I’m going to talk about read_buffer_size and how this variable together with max_allowed_packet can break your replication. The setup is a master-master replication with the following values: max_allowed_packet = 32M read_buffer_size = 100M To break the [...]
Percona Toolkit 2.1 with New Online Schema Change Tool
April 5, 2012 By 10 Comments
I’m proud to announce the GA release of version 2.1 of Percona Toolkit. Percona Toolkit is the essential suite of administrative tools for MySQL. With this release we introduce a new version of pt-online-schema-change, a tool that enables you to ALTER large tables with no blocking or downtime. As you know, MySQL locks tables for [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
March 27, 2012 By 15 Comments
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
March 23, 2012 By 20 Comments
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]
