May 21, 2013

The Math of Automated Failover

There are number of people recently blogging about MySQL automated failover, based on production incident which GitHub disclosed. Here is my take on it. When we look at systems providing high availability we can identify 2 cases of system breaking down. First is when the system itself has a bug or limitations which does not [...]

Logging MySQL queries from the client instead of the server

The “slow query log” is the single most valuable way to examine query execution on your MySQL server. Queries are logged with timing information, and in the case of Percona Server, a great deal of additional performance and other diagnostic information. But the execution time recorded in the log is the time the query took [...]

Cache Miss Storm

I worked on the problem recently which showed itself as rather low MySQL load (probably 5% CPU usage and close to zero IO) would spike to have hundreds instances of threads running at the same time, causing intense utilization spike and server very unresponsive for anywhere from half a minute to ten minutes until everything [...]

What do we optimize with mk-query-digest ?

When we’re looking at mk-query-digest report we typically look at the Queries causing the most impact (sum of the query execution times) as well as queries having some longest samples. Why are we looking at these ? Queries with highest Impact are important because looking at these queries and optimizing them typically helps to improve [...]

Goal driven performance optimization

When your goal is to optimize application performance it is very important to understand what goal do you really have. If you do not have a good understanding of the goal your performance optimization effort may well still bring its results but you may waste a lot of time before you reach same results as [...]

When to use Hardware upgrade instead of Software Optimization

One typical question which frequently pops up is whenever it is better to use hardware upgrade or optimize software more. I already wrote about it, for example here. Today I’ll look at the same topic from the consultants view. When consultant should suggest hardware upgrade and when it is not in a simple checklist form.

MySQL for Hosting Providers – how do they manage ?

Working with number of hosting providers I always wonder how do they manage to keep things up given MySQL gives you so little ways to really restrict how much resources single user can consume. I have written over a year ago about 10+ ways to crash or overload MySQL and since that people have come [...]

10+ Ways to Crash or Overload MySQL

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 [...]

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 [...]

Is it query which needs to be optimized ?

Last few days I had a lot of a lot of questions at MySQL Performance Forum as well as from our customers regarding query optimization… which had one thing in common – It is not query which needed to be optimized. Way too frequently people design schema first and then think how the queries they [...]