May 18, 2013

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 [...]

Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]

Getting MySQL Core file on Linux

Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]

Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 on August 12, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.1.58, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.58-12.9 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all [...]

How to change innodb_log_file_size safely

If you need to change MySQL’s innodb_log_file_size parameter (see How to calculate a good InnoDB log file size), you can’t just change the parameter in the my.cnf file and restart the server. If you do, InnoDB will refuse to start because the existing log files don’t match the configured size. You need to shut the [...]

Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 Stable Release

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 on July 1st, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.13, Percona Server Percona Server 5.5.13-20.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the details of the [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

How Percona diagnoses MySQL server stalls

We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a [...]

How to pretty-print my.cnf with a one-liner

When I’m looking at a server, I often want to see the /etc/my.cnf file nicely formatted, and with comments stripped. This Perl one-liner will pretty-print the file:

A quest for the full InnoDB status

When running InnoDB you are able to dig into the engine internals, look at various gauges and counters, see past deadlocks and the list of all open transactions. This is in your reach with one simple command —

. On most occasions it works beautifully. The problems appear when you have a large spike in [...]