There are many ways to slice and aggregate metrics of activity on a system such as MySQL. In the best case, we want to know everything about the system’s activity: we want to know how many things happened, how big they were, and how long they took. We want to know precisely when they happened. [...]
MySQL Connection Timeouts
April 19, 2011 By 4 Comments
Sometimes on very busy MySQL server you will see sporadic connection timeouts, such as Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘mydb’ (110). If you have connects timed in your application you will see some successful connections taking well over the second. The problem may start very slow and be almost invisible for long time, for [...]
Percona Server and XtraBackup Weekly News, April 18th
April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Last week wasn’t so active in terms of new development, because many of us were at the MySQL conference, of course. However, we did push out the XtraBackup 1.6 release, and began work on backporting some features from MySQL 5.6 to 5.1 for a certain large customer. Several of the features we’ve added in 5.0 [...]
Optimizing slow web pages with mk-query-digest
April 7, 2011 By 14 Comments
I don’t use many tools in my consulting practice but for the ones I do, I try to know them as best as I can. I’ve been using mk-query-digest for almost as long as it exists but it continues to surprise me in ways I couldn’t imagine it would. This time I’d like to share [...]
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 [...]
Performance or Stability ???
April 1, 2011 By 16 Comments
Sometimes the question is put like are you looking for Performance OR Stability, which I believe is a strange way to put it. In real life systems you care both about Performance AND Stability. I would even say Stability is a not the best world here, I would day you care about your minimal performance [...]
Maatkit’s mk-query-digest filters
March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Have you ever seen BIG weird numbers in mk-query-digest report that just seem wrong? I have! Here’s one report I got today:
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 [...]
Percona white paper: Forecasting MySQL Scalability
November 16, 2010 By 6 Comments
Ewen and I have just published Percona’s latest white paper, Forecasting MySQL Scalability with the Universal Scalability Law. This is essentially a streamlined walk-through of Dr. Neil J. Gunther’s book Guerrilla Capacity Planning, with examples to show how you can apply it to MySQL servers. One thing alluded to in the paper is extracting the [...]
