May 18, 2013

How to track down the source of Aborted_connects

Yesterday I helped someone who was seeing a lot of “server has gone away” error messages on his website. While investigating this problem, I noticed several things amiss, which appeared to be related but really weren’t. The biggest measurable sign was

Worse than DDOS

Today I worked on rather interesting customer problem. Site was subject what was considered DDOS and solution was implemented to protect from it. However in addition to banning the intruders IPs it banned IPs of web services which were very actively used by the application which caused even worse problems by consuming all apache slots [...]

MySQL net_write_timeout vs wait_timeout and protocol notes

In my previous post I mentioned you might need to increase net_write_timeout to avoid connection being aborted and now I think I should have better explained that. MySQL uses a lot of different timeout variables at different stages. For example when connection is just being established connect_timeout is used. When server waits for another query [...]

Debugging sleeping connections with MySQL

Have you ever seen connection in the SHOW PROCESSLIST output which is in “Sleep” state for a long time and you have no idea why this would happen ? I see if frequently with web applications and it is often indication of trouble. Not only it means you may run out of MySQL connections quicker [...]

InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks – part 1

Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM. The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, [...]

Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization

Linux and Unixes have excellent metric of system load called “loadavg”. In fact load average is is 3 numbers which correspond to “load average” calculated for one five and 15 minutes. It is computed as exponential moving average so most recent load have more weight in the value than old one. What does Load Average [...]

MySQL Query Cache

MySQL has a great feature called “Query Cache” which is quite helpful for MySQL Performance optimization tasks but there are number of things you need to know. First let me clarify what MySQL Query Cache is – I’ve seen number of people being confused, thinking MySQL Query Cache is the same as Oracle Query Cache [...]

How Web Services world affect LAMP Stack

In connection to my previous post I was thinking how Web 2.0 with its massive use of Web Services affect LAMP Stack ? Well actually there are serious difference both for client and server application development which you might want to take into account. If you’re developing Web Service Server application you will most likely [...]