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, [...]
MySQL 5.0 Community Edition Regression
July 27, 2007 By 2 Comments
It is true you might be better of being unaware about problems, because in this case you might not run into them Just couple of days ago Kaj Arno told me there are issues reported with SHOW PROFILE patch available in latest MySQL Community Edition and I’ve been troubleshooting customer affected by one of these [...]
Using CHAR keys for joins, how much is the overhead ?
June 18, 2007 By 18 Comments
I prefer to use Integers for joins whenever possible and today I worked with client which used character keys, in my opinion without a big need. I told them this is suboptimal but was challenged with rightful question about the difference. I did not know so I decided to benchmark. The results below are for [...]
Innodb Second Start prevention bug ?
June 16, 2007 By Leave a Comment
I filed the following bug today. Basically it looks like in certain conditions Innodb may be started twice in the parallel on the same data files which can hurt database badly. It is true it does not seems to be 100% repeatable but I’ve seen it multiple times in different environments. I’m not sure if [...]
MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 Upgrade performance regressions
June 6, 2007 By 8 Comments
This week I already had two serious performance regression cases when upgrading from MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 to MySQL 5.0. By serious I mean several times performance difference not just 5-10% you often see for simple queries due to generally fatter code. The problem in both cases was MySQL 5.0 broken group commit bug. First [...]
MySQL Installation and upgrade scripts.
May 21, 2007 By 3 Comments
I generally find MySQL Sever sufficiently tested, meaning at least minor version upgrades rarely cause the problems. Of course it is not perfect and I remember number of big issues when some releases could not be used due to behavior changes in them and when something had to be rolled back in the next release. [...]
MySQL Replication and Slow Queries
March 28, 2007 By 3 Comments
I just filed a bug regarding slow queries executed by replication thread are not being logged to the slow query log. This is not a big deal but it is ugly little gotcha which I think few people know about. It is especially bad if you’re using tools to analyze slow query log to find [...]
Integers in PHP, running with scissors, and portability
March 27, 2007 By 34 Comments
Until recently I thought that currently popular scripting languages, which mostly evolved over last 10 years or something, must allow for easier portability across different platforms compared to ye good olde C/C++. After all, their development started a few decades after C, so its notorious caveats are all well-known and should be easy to avoid [...]
Beware: key_buffer_size larger than 4G does not work
February 14, 2007 By 17 Comments
I was working with customer today which has MySQL on a system with some 64GB or RAM running MyISAM, so they set key_buffer_size to 16G… and every few days MySQL crashes. Why ? Because key_buffer_size over 4GB in size is not really supported (checked with latest and greatest MySQL Enterprise 5.0.34). It works just fine [...]
Getting MySQL to use full key length
January 31, 2007 By 5 Comments
There is one bug, or “missing feature” in MySQL Optimizer which may give you hard time causing performance problems which may be hard to track down, it is using only part of the index when full index can be used or using shorter index while there is longer index available. The last item is yet [...]
