May 18, 2013

More on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization

Since my first post on MySQL transaction descriptors optimization introduced in Percona Server 5.5.30-30.2 and a followup by Dimitri Kravchuk, we have received a large number of questions on why the benchmark results in both posts look rather different. We were curious as well, so we tried to answer that question by retrying benchmarks on [...]

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Can’t Create Thread: Errno 11 (A Tale of Two Ulimits)

Recently some of my fellow Perconians and I have noticed a bit of an uptick in customer cases featuring the following error message:

The canonical solution to this issue, if you do a bit of Googling, is to increase the number of processes / threads available to the MySQL user, typically by adding a [...]

Review of MySQL 5.6 Defaults Changes

James Day just posted the great summary of defaults changes in MySQL 5.6 compared to MySQL 5.5 In general there are a lot of good changes and many defaults are now computed instead of hardcoded. Though some of changes are rather puzzling for me. Lets go over them: back_log = 50 + ( max_connections / [...]

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 [...]

MySQL 5.5.8 and Percona Server: being adaptive

As we can see, MySQL 5.5.8 comes with great improvements and scalability fixes. Adding up all the new features, you have a great release. However, there is one area I want to touch on in this post. At Percona, we consider it important not only to have the best peak performance, but also stable and predictable performance. I refer you [...]

Impact of the number of idle connections in MySQL

Be careful with my findings, I appear to have compile in debug mode, I am redoing the benchmarks. Updated version here. I recently had to work with many customers having large number of connections opened in MySQL and although I told them this was not optimal, I had no solid arguments to present. More than [...]

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 [...]

Tuning InnoDB Concurrency Tickets

InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]

How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?

I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.