This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results. Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident. First, some background information. All tests were conducted [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster reference architecture with HaProxy
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
Configuring MySQL For High Number of Connections per Second
One thing I noticed during the observation was that there were roughly 2,000 new connections to MySQL per second during peak times. This is a high number by any account. When a new connection to MySQL is made, it can go into the back_log, which effectively serves as a queue for new connections on operating [...]
MySQL Connection Timeouts
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 [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
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 [...]
More on dangers of the caches
I wrote couple of weeks ago on dangers of bad cache design. Today I’ve been troubleshooting the production down case which had fair amount of issues related to how cache was used. The deal was as following. The update to the codebase was performed and it caused performance issues, so it was rolled back but [...]
New SpecJAppServer results at MySQL and Sun.
As you likely have seen Sun has posted the new SpecJAppServer Results More information from Tom Daly can be found here These results are quite interesting for me as I worked on some of the previous SpecJAppServer Benchmarks several years ago while being employed by MySQL. These are great results, plus they can be relevant [...]
Apache PHP MySQL and Runaway Scripts
Sometimes due to programming error or due to very complex query you can get your PHP script running too long, well after user stopped waiting for the page to render and went browsing other sites. Looking at Server-Status I’ve seen scripts executing for hours sometimes which is obviously the problem – they take Apache Slot, [...]
Why do you need many apache children ?
I already wrote kind of about same topic a while ago and now interesting real life case makes me to write again Most Web applications we’re working with have single tier web architecture, meaning there is just single set of apache servers server requests and nothing else – no dedicated server for static content, no [...]

