It’s not uncommon to promote a server from slave to master. One of the key things to protect your data integrity is to make sure that the promoted slave is permanently disconnected from its old master. If not, it may get writes from the old master, which can cause all kinds of data corruption. MySQL [...]
Disconnecting a replication slave is easier with MySQL 5.5+ (RESET SLAVE vs. RESET SLAVE ALL)
April 17, 2013 By 2 Comments
Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif
January 9, 2013 By 1 Comment
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 [...]
Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes
October 8, 2012 By 10 Comments
James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]
Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance
July 5, 2012 By 11 Comments
MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
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 [...]
Getting MySQL Core file on Linux
August 26, 2011 By 1 Comment
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 [...]
Make your file system error resilient
August 24, 2011 By 8 Comments
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 [...]
What’s required to tune MySQL?
July 27, 2011 By 4 Comments
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I explained during our conversation.
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 [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 1: Single-Threaded Replication
October 20, 2010 By 16 Comments
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it [...]
