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 [...]
Should MySQL update the default innodb_log_file_size?
November 21, 2011 By 37 Comments
Now that InnoDB is the default storage engine in MySQL, is it time to update the default configuration for the InnoDB log file size (innodb_log_file_size) setting? In general, there are two settings that simply can’t be left at their historical defaults for a production installation. MySQL 5.5 increased the default buffer pool size to something [...]
Review of Virident FlashMAX MLC cards
November 10, 2011 By 14 Comments
I have been following Virident for a long time (e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/virident-tachion-new-player-on-flash-pci-e-cards-market/). They have great PCIe Flash cards based on SLC NAND. I always thought that Virident needed to come up with an MLC card, and I am happy to see they have finally done so. At Virident’s request, I performed an evaluation of their MLC [...]
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
July 29, 2011 By 9 Comments
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
What’s a good buffer pool read/write ratio?
May 31, 2011 By 6 Comments
At Percona Live last week, someone showed me a graph from their Cacti monitoring system, using the templates that I wrote. It was the buffer pool pages read, written, and created. He asked me if the graph was okay. Shouldn’t there be a lot more pages read than written, he asked? It’s a great question. [...]
Innodb Caching (part 2)
May 10, 2011 By 7 Comments
Few weeks ago I wrote about Innodb Caching with main idea you might need more cache when you think you are because Innodb caches data in pages, not rows, and so the whole page needs to be in memory even if you need only one row from it. I have created the simple benchmark which [...]
MySQL Connection Timeouts
April 19, 2011 By 4 Comments
Sometimes on very busy MySQL server you will see sporadic connection timeouts, such as Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘mydb’ (110). If you have connects timed in your application you will see some successful connections taking well over the second. The problem may start very slow and be almost invisible for long time, for [...]
InnoDB Flushing: a lot of memory and slow disk
March 31, 2011 By 57 Comments
You may have seen in the last couple of weekly news posts that Baron mentioned we are working on a new adaptive flushing algorithm in InnoDB. In fact, we already have three such algorithms in Percona Server (reflex, estimate, keep_average). Why do we need one more? Okay, first let me start by showing the current [...]
Effect from innodb log block size 4096 bytes
January 3, 2011 By 19 Comments
In my post MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive I mentioned that I used innodb-log-block-size=4096 in Percona Server to get better throughput, but later Dimitri in his article MySQL Performance: Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5 sounded doubt that it really makes sense. Here us quote from his article: “Question: what is a [...]
MySQL 5.5.8 – in search of stability
January 3, 2011 By 11 Comments
A couple of days ago, Dimitri published a blog post, Analyzing Percona’s TPCC-like Workload on MySQL 5.5, which was a response to my post, MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive. I will refer to Dimitri’s article as article [1]. As always, Dimitri has provided a very detailed and thoughtful article, and I strongly recommend reading if [...]
