May 19, 2013

MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 default variable values differences

As the part of analyzing surprising MySQL 5.5 vs MySQL 5.6 performance results I’ve been looking at changes to default variable values. To do that I’ve loaded the values from MySQL 5.5.30 and MySQL 5.6.10 to the different tables and ran the query:

Lets go over to see what are the most important changes [...]

Profiling MySQL Memory Usage With Valgrind Massif

There are times where you need to know exactly how much memory the mysqld server (or any other program) is using, where (i.e. for what function) it was allocated, how it got there (a backtrace, please!), and at what point in time the allocation happened. For example; you may have noticed a sharp memory increase [...]

Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage

One of the most painful troubleshooting tasks with MySQL is troubleshooting memory usage. The problem usually starts like this – you have configured MySQL to use reasonable global buffers, such as innodb_buffer_size, key_buffer_size etc, you have reasonable amount of connections but yet MySQL takes much more memory than you would expect, causing swapping or other [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

MySQL Limitations Part 4: One thread per connection

This is the third in a series on what’s seriously limiting MySQL in core use cases (links: part 1, 2, 3). This post is about the way MySQL handles connections, allocating one thread per connection to the server.

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

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 [...]

Wanted: Better memory profiling for MySQL

Quite frequently I would log in to customers system and find MySQL using too much memory. I would look at memory consumed by Innodb (it is often higher than innodb_buffer_pool_size) substract memory used by other global buffers such as query_cache_size and key_buffer and will in many cases see some mysterous memory which I can’t really [...]

Should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL ?

So you’re running dedicated MySQL Linux box with plenty of memory, so the good question arises if you should have swap file enabled or disable it ? I’ve seen production successfully running on boxes both with and without swap file so it is not the question of you must do it this or that way [...]

The tool I’ve been waiting for years

I’ve just been pointed to the nice tool which I was waiting for years to see. It is fincore – little perl script which allows you to see what pages of file are cached in OS memory. This is really cool.