While doing a performance audit for a customer a few weeks ago, I tried to improve the response time of their top slow query according to pt-query-digest‘s report. This query was run very frequently and had very unstable performance: during the time data was collected, response time varied from 50µs to 1s. When I ran [...]
Secure passwords being insecure
May 27, 2012 By 6 Comments
If you follow the general advices to create secure password the following ones seem to be secure, right? s11P$||!sh&2 pr0&!!ke0 3kj39|!381 The answer to the question is, “it depends on how you use them” Notice that these passwords all contain multiple exclamation points and ampersands which are normally special characters for your shell. The people [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
May 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
“The least expensive query is the query you never run.” Data access is expensive for your application. It often requires CPU, network and disk access, all of which can take a lot of time. Using less computing resources, particularly in the cloud, results in decreased overall operational costs, so caches provide real value by avoiding [...]
Modeling MySQL Capacity by Measuring Resource Consumptions
March 8, 2011 By 1 Comment
There are many angles you can look at the system to predict in performance, the model baron has published for example is good for measuring scalability of the system as concurrency growths. In many cases however we’re facing a need to answer a question how much load a given system can handle when load is [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Slow DROP TABLE
June 16, 2009 By 21 Comments
It is a known fact that ext3 is not the most efficient file system out there and for example file removals can be painfully slow and cause a lot of random I/O. However, as it turns out, it can sometimes have a much more severe impact on the MySQL performance that it would seem. When [...]
Talking MySQL to Sphinx
April 19, 2009 By 4 Comments
In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]
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 [...]
Microslow patch for 5.1.20
July 18, 2007 By 3 Comments
Microslow patch has been there for some time, but only for earlier MySQL editions such as 4.1 and 5.0. Now it’s also available for the latest 5.1. Because MySQL went through a lot of internal changes, the patch had to be written from scratch. It introduces some minor change in existing functionality and also adds [...]
