Last week at Percona Live, I delivered a six-hour tutorial about Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) for MySQL. I actually had more material than I covered (by design), but one thing I regret we didn’t cover was Flow control. So, I thought I’d write a post covering flow control because it is important to understand. What [...]
MySQL performance: Impact of memory allocators (Part 2)
Last time I wrote about memory allocators and how they can affect MySQL performance in general. This time I would like to explore this topic from a bit different angle: What impact does the number of processor cores have on different memory allocators and what difference we will see in MySQL performance in this scenario? [...]
Announcing Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.29-30.0
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server for MySQL version 5.5.29-30.0 on February 26th, 2013 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.29, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.29-30.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details [...]
MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences
As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 | mysql [localhost] {msandbox} (test) > select var55.variable_name,left(var55.variable_value,40) value55, left(var56.variable_value,40) var56 from var55 left join var56 on var55.variable_name=var56.variable_name where var55.variable_value!=var56.variable_value; +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | variable_name | value55 | var56 | +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA | OFF | ON | | PID_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/mysq | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/mysq | | CHARACTER_SETS_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.5.30-linux2.6-x86_ | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.6.10-linux-glibc2. | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_COND_INSTANCES | 1000 | 836 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_MUTEX_INSTANCES | 1000000 | 3282 | | OLD_PASSWORDS | OFF | 0 | | INNODB_STATS_ON_METADATA | ON | OFF | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_EVENTS_WAITS_HISTORY_SIZE | 10 | 5 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_EVENTS_WAITS_HISTORY_LONG_SIZE | 10000 | 100 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_RWLOCK_INSTANCES | 1000000 | 1724 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_TABLE_HANDLES | 100000 | 2223 | | INNODB_LOG_FILE_SIZE | 5242880 | 50331648 | | BASEDIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.5.30 | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.6.10 | | BACK_LOG | 50 | 80 | | OPEN_FILES_LIMIT | 1024 | 5000 | | INNODB_AUTOEXTEND_INCREMENT | 8 | 64 | | MAX_CONNECT_ERRORS | 10 | 100 | | SORT_BUFFER_SIZE | 2097152 | 262144 | | LC_MESSAGES_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.5.30-linux2.6-x86_ | /mnt/nfs/dist/mysql-5.6.10-linux-glibc2. | | MAX_ALLOWED_PACKET | 1048576 | 4194304 | | JOIN_BUFFER_SIZE | 131072 | 262144 | | TMPDIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/tmp | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/tmp | | TABLE_OPEN_CACHE | 400 | 2000 | | INNODB_VERSION | 5.5.30 | 1.2.10 | | INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_INSTANCES | 1 | 8 | | QUERY_CACHE_SIZE | 0 | 1048576 | | SLOW_QUERY_LOG_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/dpe0 | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/dpe0 | | TABLE_DEFINITION_CACHE | 400 | 1400 | | PORT | 5530 | 5610 | | QUERY_CACHE_TYPE | ON | OFF | | REPORT_PORT | 5530 | 5610 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_FILE_INSTANCES | 10000 | 1556 | | SQL_MODE | | NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION | | INNODB_OLD_BLOCKS_TIME | 0 | 1000 | | LOG_ERROR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/msan | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/msan | | VERSION_COMPILE_OS | linux2.6 | linux-glibc2.5 | | THREAD_CACHE_SIZE | 0 | 9 | | PLUGIN_DIR | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.5.30/lib/plugin/ | /mnt/nfs/dist/5.6.10/lib/plugin/ | | SYNC_RELAY_LOG | 0 | 10000 | | GENERAL_LOG_FILE | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/dpe0 | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/dpe0 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_TABLE_INSTANCES | 50000 | 445 | | SYNC_RELAY_LOG_INFO | 0 | 10000 | | SLAVE_LOAD_TMPDIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/tmp | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/tmp | | SECURE_AUTH | OFF | ON | | VERSION | 5.5.30 | 5.6.10 | | INNODB_CONCURRENCY_TICKETS | 500 | 5000 | | INNODB_PURGE_THREADS | 0 | 1 | | INNODB_OPEN_FILES | 300 | 2000 | | INNODB_DATA_FILE_PATH | ibdata1:10M:autoextend | ibdata1:12M:autoextend | | INNODB_PURGE_BATCH_SIZE | 20 | 300 | | PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA_MAX_THREAD_INSTANCES | 1000 | 224 | | SOCKET | /tmp/mysql_sandbox5530.sock | /tmp/mysql_sandbox5610.sock | | INNODB_FILE_PER_TABLE | OFF | ON | | SYNC_MASTER_INFO | 0 | 10000 | | DATADIR | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_5_30/data/ | /mnt/data/sandboxes/msb_5_6_10/data/ | | OPTIMIZER_SWITCH | index_merge=on,index_merge_union=on,inde | index_merge=on,index_merge_union=on,inde | +---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+ 56 rows in set (0.05 sec) |
Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]
Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)
Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:
1 2 | SQLSTATE[HY000] [1135] Can't create a new thread (errno 11); if you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug. |
The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]
How does MySQL Replication really work?
While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]
MySQL Indexing Best Practices: Webinar Questions Followup
I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Filling the tmp partition with persistent connections
The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space. Let’s see one example. We’re running [...]
A case for MariaDB’s Hash Joins
MariaDB 5.3/5.5 has introduced a new join type “Hash Joins” which is an implementation of a Classic Block-based Hash Join Algorithm. In this post we will see what the Hash Join is, how it works and for what types of queries would it be the right choice. I will show the results of executing benchmarks [...]

