It is a known fact that ext3 is not the most efficient file system out there and for example file removals can be painfully slow and cause a lot of random I/O. However, as it turns out, it can sometimes have a much more severe impact on the MySQL performance that it would seem. When [...]
The perils of InnoDB with Debian and startup scripts
January 28, 2009 By 13 Comments
Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance. It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right [...]
Finding what Created_tmp_disk_tables with log_slow_filter
September 22, 2008 By 3 Comments
Whilst working with a client recently I noticed a large number of temporary tables being created on disk.
1 2 3 4 5 | show global status like 'Created_tmp%' | Created_tmp_disk_tables | 91970 | | Created_tmp_files | 19624 | | Created_tmp_tables | 1617031 | |
A common problem when optimizing COUNT()
September 20, 2008 By 18 Comments
When optimizing queries for customers, the first thing I do with a slow query is figure out what it’s trying to do. You can’t fully optimize a query unless you know how to consider alternative ways to write it, and you can’t do that unless you know what the query “means.” I frequently run into [...]
Missing Data – rows used to generate result set
July 20, 2008 By 15 Comments
As Baron writes it is not the number of rows returned by the query but number of rows accessed by the query will most likely be defining query performance. Of course not all row accessed are created equal (such as full table scan row accesses may be much faster than random index lookups row accesses [...]
10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL
November 13, 2007 By 20 Comments
People are sometimes contacting me and asking about bugs like this which provide a trivial way to crash MySQL to the user with basic privileges and asking me what to do. My answer to them is – there is nothing new to it and they just sit should back and relax Really – there are [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
October 26, 2007 By 19 Comments
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
Microslow patch for 5.1.20
July 18, 2007 By 3 Comments
Microslow patch has been there for some time, but only for earlier MySQL editions such as 4.1 and 5.0. Now it’s also available for the latest 5.1. Because MySQL went through a lot of internal changes, the patch had to be written from scratch. It introduces some minor change in existing functionality and also adds [...]
Commodity Hardware, Commodity Software and Commodity People
June 15, 2007 By 9 Comments
In the previous post I mentioned not all architectures and solutions work for Commodity People, and people seems to agree with me. Number of vendors would claim they are in Commodity Software or Hardware business but few would probably mention they are doing it for Commodity People, because few people would like to be called [...]
