May 21, 2013

Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3

Percona Server version 5.1.52-12.3 is now available for download. The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona release candidate to the latest version of MySQL 5.1. The release also includes the HandlerSocket plugin, which provides NoSQL features in Percona Server. Functionality Added or Changed Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 is now based on [...]

Percona Server 5.1.52-rel11.6

Percona Server version 5.1.52-rel11.6 is now available for download. The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona stable release to the latest version of MySQL 5.1. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.52-rel11.6 is now based on MySQL 5.1.52.  New Features Added: None  Other Changes: None Bugs Fixed Bug #671764 – [...]

MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection

This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.

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 [...]

Cache Miss Storm

I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything [...]

Caching could be the last thing you want to do

I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching.  Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]

mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache

I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow query log. Maatkit includes tools which interact with these logs, [...]

On Good Instrumentation

In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is there it is frequently looking at some metrics which [...]

Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio

I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]

More on table_cache

In my previous post I looked into how large table_cache actually can decrease performance. The “miss” path is getting more expensive very quickly as table cache growths so if you’re going to have high miss ratio anyway you’re better off with small table cache. What I have not checked though is how does table_cache (or [...]