May 19, 2013

On Good Instrumentation

In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is there it is frequently looking at some metrics which [...]

Maatkit Now Supports Memcached

Have you ever wondered how optimized your Memcached installation is? There is a common misconception that one doesn’t have to think too deeply about Memcached performance, but that is not true. If your setup is inefficient, you could: Burn Memory Waste Network Round-Trips Store Keys That Never Get Retrieved Have a Low Cache Hit Ratio [...]

Worse than DDOS

Today I worked on rather interesting customer problem. Site was subject what was considered DDOS and solution was implemented to protect from it. However in addition to banning the intruders IPs it banned IPs of web services which were very actively used by the application which caused even worse problems by consuming all apache slots [...]

State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?

There are interesting posts these day about future of MySQL Replication by Brian Frank and Arjen. I think it very interesting to take a look at a bit bigger picture using framework from Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution. I’m not going to speak about disruption and commoditisation of Database Market, leaving this for Market talks, [...]

Economics of Performance Optimization

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]

Top 5 Wishes for MySQL

About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]

Beware large Query_Cache sizes

During last couple of months I had number of consulting projects with MySQL Query Cache being source of serious problems. One would see queries both for MyISAM and Innodb tables mysteriously stalling for few seconds with “NULL” in State column. These could be troubleshooted to waiting on Query Cache which at the same time had [...]

Debugging sleeping connections with MySQL

Have you ever seen connection in the SHOW PROCESSLIST output which is in “Sleep” state for a long time and you have no idea why this would happen ? I see if frequently with web applications and it is often indication of trouble. Not only it means you may run out of MySQL connections quicker [...]

Wishes for new “Pure PHP” MySQL driver

If you’re following MySQL or PHP landscape you should have seen announcement by MySQL to develop pure PHP driver. If not – Here is FAQ . I’m to meet the team (Georg, Andrey etc) which will be developing this driver during my visit to Open Source Database Conference in November so I thought it would [...]

Cache Performance Comparison

Jay Pipes continues cache experiements and has compared performance of MySQL Query Cache and File Cache. Jay uses Apache Benchmark to compare full full stack, cached or not which is realistic but could draw missleading picture as contribution of different components may be different depending on your unique applications. For example for application containing a [...]