Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]
How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?
September 9, 2012 By 9 Comments
Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?
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 [...]
Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition
December 16, 2011 By 9 Comments
There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
Recovering Linux software RAID, RAID5 Array
August 27, 2011 By 2 Comments
Dealing with MySQL you might need to deal with RAID recovery every so often. Sometimes because of client lacking the proper backup or sometimes because recovering RAID might improve recovery, for example you might get point in time recovery while backup setup only takes you to the point where last binary log was backed up. [...]
Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Theory
June 9, 2011 By 18 Comments
Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at [...]
Impact of the sort buffer size in MySQL
October 25, 2010 By 8 Comments
The parameter sort_buffer_size is one the MySQL parameters that is far from obvious to adjust. It is a per session buffer that is allocated every time it is needed. The problem with the sort buffer comes from the way Linux allocates memory. Monty Taylor (here) have described the underlying issue in detail, but basically above [...]
MySQL random freezes could be the query cache
March 19, 2009 By 23 Comments
I feel like I’ve been seeing this a lot lately. occasionally, seemingly innocuous selects take unacceptably long. Or Over the past few weeks, we’ve been having bizarre outages during which everything seems to grind to a halt… and then fixes itself within 5 minutes. We’ve got plenty of memory, we’re not running into swap, and [...]
How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit
November 24, 2008 By 17 Comments
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 [...]
Should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL ?
April 6, 2008 By 31 Comments
So you’re running dedicated MySQL Linux box with plenty of memory, so the good question arises if you should have swap file enabled or disable it ? I’ve seen production successfully running on boxes both with and without swap file so it is not the question of you must do it this or that way [...]
