I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User Statistics from Percona Server and pt-index-usage. User Statistics User Statistics is an improvement [...]
Troubleshooting MySQL Memory Usage
March 21, 2012 By 5 Comments
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 [...]
How to recover deleted rows from an InnoDB Tablespace
February 20, 2012 By 4 Comments
In my previous post I explained how it could be possible to recover, on some specific cases, a single table from a full backup in order to save time and make the recovery process more straightforward. Now the scenario is worse because we don’t have a backup or the backup restore process doesn’t work. How [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Innodb undo segment size and transaction isolation
January 12, 2011 By 3 Comments
You might know if you have long running transactions you’re risking having a lot of “garbage” accumulated in undo segment size which can cause performance degradation as well as increased disk space usage. Long transactions can also be bad for other reasons such as taking row level locks which will prevent other transactions for execution, [...]
