Over last few years I’ve been suggesting more people to disable Query Cache than to enable it. It can cause contention problems as well as stalls and due to coarse invalidation is not as efficient as it could be. These are however mostly due to neglect Query Cache received over almost 10 years, with very [...]
Ultimate MySQL variable and status reference list
January 8, 2011 By 4 Comments
I am constantly referring to the amazing MySQL manual, especially the option and variable reference table. But just as frequently, I want to look up blog posts on variables, or look for content in the Percona documentation or forums. So I present to you what is now my newest Firefox toolbar bookmark: an option and [...]
Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4
December 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Percona Server version 5.1.53-12.4 is now available for download. It is now the current stable release version. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.53-12.4 is based on MySQL 5.1.53.  New Features Added: Precompiled UDFs for Maatkit (FNV and MurmurHash hash functions to provide faster checksums) are now included in distributions. Fixes feature request #689992. (Aleksandr Kuzminsky) [...]
Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3
December 13, 2010 By 2 Comments
Percona Server version 5.1.52-12.3 is now available for download. The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona release candidate to the latest version of MySQL 5.1. The release also includes the HandlerSocket plugin, which provides NoSQL features in Percona Server. Functionality Added or Changed Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 is now based on [...]
Percona Server 5.1.52-rel11.6
November 23, 2010 By 2 Comments
Percona Server version 5.1.52-rel11.6 is now available for download. The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona stable release to the latest version of MySQL 5.1. Functionality Added or Changed  Percona Server 5.1.52-rel11.6 is now based on MySQL 5.1.52.  New Features Added: None  Other Changes: None Bugs Fixed Bug #671764 – [...]
More on dangers of the caches
September 23, 2010 By 5 Comments
I wrote couple of weeks ago on dangers of bad cache design. Today I’ve been troubleshooting the production down case which had fair amount of issues related to how cache was used. The deal was as following. The update to the codebase was performed and it caused performance issues, so it was rolled back but [...]
Cache Miss Storm
September 10, 2010 By 30 Comments
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 [...]
Caching could be the last thing you want to do
July 24, 2010 By 14 Comments
I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching. Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]
On Good Instrumentation
May 31, 2010 By 1 Comment
In so many cases troubleshooting applications I keep thinking how much more efficient things could be going if only there would be a good instrumentation available. Most of applications out there have very little code to help understand what is going on and if it is there it is frequently looking at some metrics which [...]
mk-query-digest, query comments and the query cache
I very much like the fact that MySQL allows you to embed comments into SQL statements. These comments are extremely convenient, because they are written into MySQL log files as part of the query. This includes the general log, the binary log and the slow query log. Maatkit includes tools which interact with these logs, [...]