Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this [...]
Should we give a MySQL Query Cache a second chance ?
April 10, 2011 By 64 Comments
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 [...]
MySQL Limitations Part 1: Single-Threaded Replication
October 20, 2010 By 16 Comments
I recently mentioned a few of the big “non-starter” limitations Postgres has overcome for specific use cases. I decided to write a series of blog posts on MySQL’s unsolved severe limitations. I mean limitations that really hobble it for major, important needs — not in areas where it isn’t used, but in areas where it [...]
Purge Thread Spiral of Death
June 10, 2010 By 5 Comments
I just wrote a large post on reasons for innodb main tablespace excessive growth and I thought it would make sense to explain briefly of why it is so frequently you have purge not being the problem at all and when out of no where you can see purge thread being unable to keep up [...]
Reasons for run-away main Innodb Tablespace
June 10, 2010 By 2 Comments
So you’re running MySQL With innodb_file_per_table option but your ibdata1 file which holds main (or system) tablespace have grown dramatically from its starting 10MB size. What could be the reason of this growth and what you can do about it ? There are few things which are always stored in main tablespace – these are [...]
Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio
February 28, 2010 By 28 Comments
I have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it’s time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL’s key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit ratio, and [...]
Rare evil MySQL Bug
November 20, 2009 By 7 Comments
There is the rare bug which I ran into every so often. Last time I’ve seen it about 3 years ago on MySQL 4.1 and I hoped it is long fixed since… but it looks like it is not. I now get to see MySQL 5.4.2 in the funny state. When you see bug happening [...]
How innodb_open_files affects performance
November 18, 2009 By 4 Comments
Recently I looked at table_cache sizing which showed larger table cache does not always provides the best performance. So I decided to look at yet another similar variable – innodb_open_files which defines how many files Innodb will keep open while working in innodb_file_per_table mode. Unlike MyISAM Innodb does not have to keep open file descriptor [...]
table_cache negative scalability
November 16, 2009 By 23 Comments
Couple of months ago there was a post by FreshBooks on getting great performance improvements by lowering table_cache variable. So I decided to investigate what is really happening here. The “common sense” approach to tuning caches is to get them as large as you can if you have enough resources (such as memory). With MySQL [...]
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3
October 19, 2009 By 25 Comments
This is part 3 of our series. In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database. The [...]
