A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects. Some typical use cases include: Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc) Full page output (relatively static pages) Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries) Infrequently [...]
Percona XtraDB Cluster Feature 1: High Availability
There and in coming posts I am going to cover main features of Percona XtraDB Cluster. The first feature is High Availability. But before jumping to HA, let’s review general architecture of the Percona XtraDB Cluster.
Preprocessing Data
There are many ways of improving response times for users. There are some people that spend a lot of time, energy and money on trying to have the application respond as fast as possible at the time when the users made the request. Those people may miss out on an opportunity to do some or [...]
MySQL caching methods and tips
“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 [...]
Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4
Percona Server version 5.1.53-12.4 is now available for download. It is now the current stable release version. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4 is based on MySQL 5.1.53.  New Features Added: Precompiled UDFs for Maatkit (FNV and MurmurHash hash functions to provide faster checksums) are now included in distributions. Fixes feature request #689992. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky) [...]
Percona Server 5.1.53-11.7
Percona Server version 5.1.53-11.7 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 5.1.53-11.7 is now based on MySQL 5.1.53.  New Features Added: None  Other Changes: None Bugs Fixed Bug #643149 – [...]
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 [...]
Percona Server 5.1.49-rel12.0
Dear Community, Starting with this release, we introduce a new release model for Percona Server. From now on, we will have both Stable and Release Candidate releases. Release Candidates will introduce new features not yet available in Stable releases. Along with new features, our new 5.1.49-12.0 RC contains a couple of patches from the Facebook-MySQL [...]
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 [...]

