May 19, 2013

The write cache: Swap insanity tome III

Swapping has always been something bad for MySQL performance but it is even more important for HA systems. It is so important to avoid swapping with HA that NDB cluster basically forbids calling malloc after the startup phase and hence its rather complex configuration. Probably most readers of this blog know (or should know) about [...]

Getting MySQL Core file on Linux

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 [...]

MySQL Connection Timeouts

Sometimes on very busy MySQL server you will see sporadic connection timeouts, such as Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘mydb’ (110). If you have connects timed in your application you will see some successful connections taking well over the second. The problem may start very slow and be almost invisible for long time, for [...]

Rare evil MySQL Bug

There is the rare bug which I ran into every so often. Last time I’ve seen it about 3 years ago on MySQL 4.1 and I hoped it is long fixed since… but it looks like it is not. I now get to see MySQL 5.4.2 in the funny state. When you see bug happening [...]

Poor man’s query logging

Occasionally there is a need to see what queries reach MySQL. The database provides several ways to share that information with you. One is called general log activated with

(or

in MySQL 5.1+) start-up parameter. The log writes any query being executed by MySQL to a file with limited amount of additional information. [...]

128GB or RAM finally got cheap

I did not usually go to “Elite” servers on Dell web site but looking at customers system today I went to check Dell Poweredge R900. This monster takes up to 4 Quad Core CPUs and has 32 memory slots, which allows to get 128GB of memory with 4GB of memory chips. This means upgrade to [...]

How much overhead DRDB could cause ?

I was working with the customer today investigating MySQL over DRBD performance issues. His basic question was why there is so much overhead with DRBD in my case, while it is said there should be no more than 30% overhead when DRBD is used. The truth is – because how DRBD works it does not [...]

Add an option to Fail on Innodb Initialize failure, Please ?

I already wrote about this issue but as I is third team I’m helping customers to resolve this “frm corruption” issue it is the time to return to it again. During MySQL 5.0 release cycle the change was made so now MySQL does not stop if Innodb storage engine failed to initialize but starts properly… [...]