MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the [...]
Data compression in InnoDB for text and blob fields
May 30, 2012 By 2 Comments
Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
How To Test Your Upgrades – pt-upgrade
December 29, 2011 By 7 Comments
Upgrades are usually one of the biggest part of any database infrastructure maintenance. Even with enough planning something else can go bad after sending your production application to the version you’ve upgraded to. Let’s look at how one Percona Toolkit tool, pt-upgrade can help you identify what to expect and test your upgrades better which [...]
Helgrinding MySQL with InnoDB for Synchronisation Errors, Fun and Profit
November 24, 2011 By 2 Comments
It is no secret that bugs related to multithreading–deadlocks, data races, starvations etc–have a big impact on application’s stability and are at the same time hard to find due to their nondeterministic nature. Any tool that makes finding such bugs easier, preferably before anybody is aware of their existence, is very welcome.
Getting MySQL Core file on Linux
August 26, 2011 By 1 Comment
Core file can be quite helpful to troubleshoot MySQL Crashes yet it is not always easy to get, especially with recent Linux distributions which have security features to prevent core files to be dumped by setuid processes (and MySQL Server is most commonly ran changing user from “root” to “mysql”). Before you embark on enabling [...]
A recovery trivia or how to recover from a lost ibdata1 file
June 3, 2011 By 8 Comments
A few day ago, a customer came to Percona needing to recover data. Basically, while doing a transfer from one SAN to another, something went wrong and they lost the ibdata1 file, where all the table meta-data is stored. Fortunately, they were running with innodb_file_per_table so the data itself was available. What they could provide [...]
Where does HandlerSocket really save you time?
March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
HandlerSocket has really generated a lot of interest because of the dual promises of ease-of-use and blazing-fast performance. The performance comes from eliminating CPU consumption. Akira Higuchi’s HandlerSocket presentation from a couple of months back had some really good profile results for libmysql versus libhsclient (starting at slide 15). Somebody in the audience at Percona [...]
How to debug long-running transactions in MySQL
March 8, 2011 By 6 Comments
Among the many things that can cause a “server stall” is a long-running transaction. If a transaction remains open for a very long time without committing, and has modified data, then other transactions could block and fail with a lock wait timeout. The problem is, it can be very difficult to find the offending code [...]
How Percona diagnoses MySQL server stalls
March 3, 2011 By 6 Comments
We receive many requests for help with server stalls. They come under various names: lockup, freeze, sudden slowdown. When something happens only once or twice a day, it can be difficult to catch it in action. Unfortunately, this often leads to trial-and-error approaches, which can drag on for days (or even months), and cause a [...]
Logging MySQL queries from the client instead of the server
February 2, 2011 By 2 Comments
The “slow query log” is the single most valuable way to examine query execution on your MySQL server. Queries are logged with timing information, and in the case of Percona Server, a great deal of additional performance and other diagnostic information. But the execution time recorded in the log is the time the query took [...]
