I had the chance to work on an interesting case last week, and I thought I’d share what I think is a little known goodie from Percona Toolkit for MySQL called pt-query-digest. One customer was suffering from periods of high load on their database server, leading to degraded application performance, and sometimes even short moments [...]
Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5
February 1, 2013 By 9 Comments
While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not [...]
Announcing Percona Server 5.6 Alpha
August 14, 2012 By 2 Comments
We are very happy to announce our first alpha of Percona Server 5.6. Based on MySQL 5.6.5 and all the improvements contained within, this is the first step towards a full Percona Server 5.6 release. Binaries are available to download from our downloads site here: http://www.percona.com/downloads/Percona-Server-5.6/Percona-Server-5.6.5-alpha60.0/ We will post binaries to our EXPERIMENTAL repositories later, we’re [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
March 23, 2012 By 20 Comments
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
How to Monitor MySQL with Percona’s Nagios Plugins
February 22, 2012 By 11 Comments
In this post, I’ll cover the new MySQL monitoring plugins we created for Nagios, and explain their features and intended purpose. I want to add a little context. What problem were we trying to solve with these plugins? Why yet another set of MySQL monitoring plugins? The typical problem with Nagios monitoring (and indeed with [...]
Return of the Query Cache, win a Percona Live ticket
August 26, 2011 By 4 Comments
It’s Friday again, and time for another TGIF give-away of a Percona Live London ticket! But first, what’s new with the MySQL query cache? You may know that it still has the same fundamental architecture that it’s always had, and that this can cause scalability problems and locking, but there have been some important changes [...]
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 [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Cache Miss Storm
September 10, 2010 By 30 Comments
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 [...]
Estimating Replication Capacity
July 20, 2010 By 4 Comments
It is easy for MySQL replication to become bottleneck when Master server is not seriously loaded and the more cores and hard drives the get the larger the difference becomes, as long as replication remains single thread process. At the same time it is a lot easier to optimize your system when your replication runs [...]
