May 19, 2013

Why Swapping is bad for MySQL Performance ?

So you get MySQL or other applications using too much memory on the box or OS behaving funny and using more memory for cache and pushing application to the swap. This causes swapping and causes performance problems. This much is obvious. But how bad is it ? Should you count it same as normal Disk [...]

Air traffic queries in LucidDB

After my first post Analyzing air traffic performance with InfoBright and MonetDB where I was not able to finish task with LucidDB, John Sichi contacted me with help to setup. You can see instruction how to load data on LucidDB Wiki page You can find the description of benchmark in original post, there I will [...]

Living with backups

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 [...]

Fighting MySQL Replication Lag

The problem of MySQL Replication unable to catch up is quite common in MySQL world and in fact I already wrote about it. There are many aspects of managing mysql replication lag such as using proper hardware and configuring it properly. In this post I will just look at couple of query design mistakes which [...]

Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!

For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]

Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL Needs

I’m often asked how one can evaluate IO subsystem (Hard drive RAID or SAN) performance for MySQL needs so I’ve decided to write some simple steps you can take to get a good feeling about it, it is not perfect but usually can tell you quite a lot of what you should expect from the [...]

Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I

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 [...]

Managing Slave Lag with MySQL Replication

The question I often get is how far MySQL may fall behind and how to keep replication from lagging. The lag you will see will vary a lot from application to the application and from load to load. Plus what is the most important within same application the lag will likely have spikes – most [...]

Microslow patch for 5.1.20

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 [...]

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 [...]