May 25, 2013

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

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 [...]

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 released today with beta support for MySQL 5.6

Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 was released today and the new version comes with some pretty cool news: Beta support for MySQL 5.6 (which as you might know is also in beta). In addition to various bug fixes, Percona Toolkit 2.1.8 also offers beta support for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Version 2.1.8 continues the trend of solid [...]

How does MySQL Replication really work?

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t [...]

MySQL Wish for 2013 – Better Memory Accounting

With Performance Schema improvements in MySQL 5.6 I think we’re in the good shape with insight on what is causing performance bottlenecks as well as where CPU resources are spent. (Performance Schema does not accounts CPU usage directly but it is something which can be relatively easily derived from wait and stage information). Where we’re [...]

Realtime stats to pay attention to in Percona XtraDB Cluster and Galera

I learn more and more about Galera every day.  As I learn more, I try to keep my myq_gadgets toolkit up to date with what I consider is important to keep any eye on on a PXC node.  In that spirit, I just today pushed some changes to the ‘wsrep’ report, and I thought I’d go over [...]

Knowing what pt-online-schema-change will do

pt-online-schema-change is simple to use, but internally it is complex.  Baron’s webinar about pt-online-schema-change hinted at several of the tool’s complexities.  Consequently, users often want to know before making changes what pt-online-schema-change will do when it runs.  The tool has two options to help answer this question: –dry-run and –print. When ran with –dry-run and –print, pt-online-schema-change changes nothing [...]

Measuring the amount of writes in InnoDB redo logs

Choosing a good InnoDB log file size is key to InnoDB write performance. This can be done by measuring the amount of writes in the redo logs. You can find a detailed explanation in this post. To sum up, here are the main points: The redo logs should be large enough to store at most [...]

Timezone and pt-table-checksum

I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones.  Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.  From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]

How to obtain the “LES” (Last Executed Statement) from an Optimized Core Dump?

Ever ran into a situation where you saw “some important variable you really needed to know about=<optimized out>” while debugging?