SHOW PROFILES shows how much time MySQL spends in various phases of query execution, but it isn’t a full-featured profile. By that, I mean that it doesn’t show similar phases aggregated together, doesn’t sort them by worst-first, and doesn’t show the relative amount of time consumed. I’ll profile the “nicer_but_slower_film_list” included with the Sakila sample [...]
Can we improve MySQL variable handling ?
February 18, 2012 By 8 Comments
MySQL Settings (also known as Server Variables) have interesting property. When you set variable in running server this change is not persisted in any way and server will be back to old value upon restart. MySQL also does not have option to re-read config file without restarting as some other software so approach to change [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Upgrade Performance Regressions
February 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment
So lets say you upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to Percona Server 5.5 and instead of expected performance improvement you see your performance being worse. What should you do ? First if you followed MySQL upgrade best practices such as testing your workload with pt-upgrade the chances of this happening are rather slim. But lets assume [...]
Solving INFORMATION_SCHEMA slowness
December 23, 2011 By 25 Comments
Many of us find INFORMATION_SCHEMA painfully slow to work it when it comes to retrieving table meta data. Many people resort to using file system tools instead to find for example how much space innodb tables are using and things like it. Besides being just slow accessing information_schema can often impact server performance dramatically. The [...]
Innodb vs MySQL index counts
November 29, 2011 By 6 Comments
I had a customer recently who a few strange errors in their mysqld.err log:
1 | [ERROR] Table database_name/table_name contains 8 indexes inside InnoDB, which is different from the number of indexes 7 defined in the MySQL |
This customer was running Percona Server 5.1 and they got this error on two tables during a maintenance window when they were adding indexes to the same tables. We had a suspicion that it had something to do with Fast [...]
MySQL opening .frm even when table is in table definition cache
November 21, 2011 By 8 Comments
or… “the case of Stewart recognizing parameters to the read() system call in strace output”. Last week, a colleague asked a question: I have an instance of MySQL with 100 tables and the table_definition_cache set to 1000. My understanding of this is that MySQL won’t revert to opening the FRM files to read the table [...]
Eventual Consistency in MySQL
November 18, 2011 By 8 Comments
We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned. But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2 MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high. But [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
November 13, 2011 By 7 Comments
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
When Does InnoDB Update Table Statistics? (And When It Can Bite)
October 6, 2011 By 7 Comments
An InnoDB table statistics is used for JOIN optimizations and helping the MySQL optimizer choose the appropriate index for a query. If a table’s statistics or index cardinality becomes outdated, you might see queries which previously performed well suddenly show up on slow query log until InnoDB again updates the statistics. But when does InnoDB [...]
Reasons for MySQL Replication Lag
July 29, 2011 By 9 Comments
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually [...]
