May 19, 2013

Make your file system error resilient

One of the typical problems I see setting up ext2/3/4 file system is sticking to defaults when it comes to behavior on errors. By default these filesystems are configured to Continue when error (such as IO error or meta data inconsistency) is discovered which can continue spreading corruption. This manifests itself in a worst way [...]

Percona XtraBackup 1.6

Percona XtraBackup 1.6 is now available for download and is the current stable release version of XtraBackup.

fsyncs on software raid on FusionIO

As soon as we get couple FusionIO cards, there is question how to join them in single space for database. FusionIO does not provide any mirroring/stripping solutions and totally relies on OS tools there. So for Linux we have software RAID and LVM, I tried to followup on my post How many fsync / sec [...]

Percona is hiring a consultant

We’re hiring. We are looking for the following qualifications: Expert knowledge of MySQL. Not just “certified” — years of production experience with it. You need to know server internals, for example. You need to be able to do anything from optimizing difficult queries to moving high-volume services between data centers without interruption. Expert knowledge of [...]

NILFS – may be not yet

Inspired by NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream and some customers asked if they should try NILFS on their SSD disks I decided to run quick tests to see how it performs. Installation on our Ubuntu 8.10 with SSD disk (Intel X25-E, 32GB) was pretty plain and I got partition with NILFS without [...]

EC2/EBS single and RAID volumes IO benchmark

During preparation of Percona-XtraDB template to run in RightScale environment, I noticed that IO performance on EBS volume in EC2 cloud is not quite perfect. So I have spent some time benchmarking volumes. Interesting part with EBS volumes is that you see it as device in your OS, so you can easily make software RAID [...]

Beware: ext3 and sync-binlog do not play well together

One of our customers reported strange problem with MySQL having extremely poor performance when sync-binlog=1 is enabled, even though the system with RAID and BBU were expected to have much better performance. The problem could be repeated with SysBench as follows:

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

The tool I’ve been waiting for years

I’ve just been pointed to the nice tool which I was waiting for years to see. It is fincore – little perl script which allows you to see what pages of file are cached in OS memory. This is really cool.

Be careful rotating MySQL logs

If you enable logging of all queries as “slow queries” using the patch or MySQL 5.1 you can get log file to grow huge. Same may happen with general log file. In some cases we’ve got log file sizes of 100G or more which may need to be cleaned up. Here is some danger waiting [...]