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 [...]
How to calculate a good InnoDB log file size
November 21, 2008 By 35 Comments
Peter wrote a post a while ago about choosing a good InnoDB log file size. Not to pick on Peter, but the post actually kind of talks about a lot of things and then doesn’t tell you how to choose a good log file size! So I thought I’d clarify it a little. The basic [...]
Living with backups
November 6, 2008 By 28 Comments
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 [...]
Predicting Performance improvements from memory increase
August 7, 2008 By 6 Comments
One common question I guess is how much should I see performance improved in case I increase memory say from 16GB to 32GB. The benefit indeed can be very application dependent – if you have working set of say 30GB with uniform data access raising memory from 16GB to 32GB can improve performance order of [...]
More Gotchas with MySQL 5.0
July 27, 2007 By 23 Comments
Working on large upgrade of MySQL 4.1 running Innodb to MySQL 5.0 and doing oprofile analyzes we found very interesting issue of buf_get_latched_pages_number being responsible for most CPU usage. It did not look right. The close look revealed this is the function which is used to compute number of latched pages in Innodb Buffer Pool, [...]
Can Innodb Read-Ahead reduce read performance ?
June 26, 2007 By 2 Comments
I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see [...]
Debugging sleeping connections with MySQL
February 8, 2007 By 30 Comments
Have you ever seen connection in the SHOW PROCESSLIST output which is in “Sleep” state for a long time and you have no idea why this would happen ? I see if frequently with web applications and it is often indication of trouble. Not only it means you may run out of MySQL connections quicker [...]
Using LoadAvg for Performance Optimization
December 4, 2006 By 5 Comments
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 [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
July 17, 2006 By 40 Comments
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]
