Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
Innodb row size limitation
April 7, 2011 By 12 Comments
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
How InnoDB handles REDO logging
February 3, 2011 By 19 Comments
Xaprb (Baron) recently blogged about how InnoDB performs a checkpoint , I thought it might be useful to explain another important mechanism that affects both response time and throughput – The transaction log.
Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta
December 13, 2010 By 6 Comments
Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta is now available for download. This release adds additional functionality to Percona XtraBackup 1.4, the current general availability version of XtraBackup. This is a beta release. Functionality Added or Changed Support for MySQL 5.5 databases has been implemented. (Yasufumi Kinoshita) XtraBackup can now be built from the MySQL 5.1.52, MySQL 5.5.7, or Percona Server [...]
MySQL Partitioning – can save you or kill you
December 11, 2010 By 44 Comments
I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
November 18, 2009 By 4 Comments
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
table_cache negative scalability
November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
Compression for InnoDB backup
March 16, 2009 By 19 Comments
Playing with last version of xtrabackup and compress it I noticed that gzip is unacceptable slow for both compression and decompression operations. Actually Peter wrote about it some time ago, but I wanted to review that data having some new information. In current multi-core word the compression utility should utilize several CPU to speedup operation, [...]
Disaster: LVM Performance in Snapshot Mode
February 5, 2009 By 55 Comments
In many cases I speculate how things should work based on what they do and in number of cases this lead me forming too good impression about technology and when running in completely unanticipated bug or performance bottleneck. This is exactly the case with LVM Number of customers have reported the LVM gives very high [...]
Estimating Undo Space needed for LVM Snapshot
June 9, 2008 By 5 Comments
We know MySQL Backups using LVM are pretty cool (check out mylvmbackup) or MMM though it is quite typical LVM is not configurable properly to be usable for MySQL Backups. Quite frequently I find LVM installed on the system but no free space left to be used as snapshot undo space, which means LVM is [...]
