May 22, 2013

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 and the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this. [...]

Investigating MySQL Replication Latency in Percona XtraDB Cluster

I was curious to check how Percona XtraDB Cluster behaves when it comes to MySQL replication latency — or better yet, call it data propagation latency. It was interesting to see whenever I can get stale data reads from other cluster nodes after write performed to some specific node. To test it I wrote quite a [...]

Announcing Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 2.0.5 on January 23rd, 2012. Downloads are available from our download site here and Percona Software Repositories. This release is the current GA (Generally Available) stable release in the 2.0 series. New Features: New option –defaults-extra-file has been introduced. This option specifies from what extra file to read [...]

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 [...]

How Does Semisynchronous MySQL Replication Work?

With the recent release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, I am increasingly being asked about MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication. I find that there are often a number of misconceptions about how semi-synchronous replication really works. I think it is very important to understand what guarantees you actually get with semi-synchronous replication, and what you don’t get. The [...]

Actively monitoring replication connectivity with MySQL’s heartbeat

Until MySQL 5.5 the only variable used to identify a network connectivity problem between Master and Slave was slave-net-timeout. This variable specifies the number of seconds to wait for more Binary Logs events from the master before abort the connection and establish it again. With a default value of 3600 this has been a historically [...]

Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance

When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]

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 [...]

Beyond great cache hit ratio

I worked with application recently which has great memcached hit ratio – over 99% but yet still has average page response time over 500ms. Reason ? There are hundreds memcached gets and even though they have some 0.4ms response time they add up to add hundreds of ms to the total response time.

Quick comparison of MyISAM, Infobright, and MonetDB

Recently I was doing a little work for a client who has MyISAM tables with many columns (the same one Peter wrote about recently). The client’s performance is suffering in part because of the number of columns, which is over 200. The queries are generally pretty simple (sums of columns), but they’re ad-hoc (can access [...]