One problem that’s a lot less common these days is swapping. Most of the issues that cause swapping with MySQL have been nailed down to several different key configuration points, either in the OS or MySQL, or issues like the swap insanity issue documented by Jeremy Cole back in 2010. As such, it’s usually pretty easy to resolve these issues and keep MySQL out of swap space. Recently, however, we had tried all of the usual tricks but had an issue where MySQL was still swapping.

The server with the issue was a VM running with a single CPU socket (multiple cores), so we knew it wasn’t NUMA. Swappiness and MySQL were both configured correctly and when you checked the output of free -m it showed 4735M of memory available.

[sylvester@host~]$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available …

Not a ground-breaking post here, but if you are interested in knowing more about the innodb_log_block_size variable, or if you use SSD cards and/or large InnoDB log files on ext4, then this is for you.

I’d read about it before briefly before, but didn’t give it too much thought until I ran across the following entry in an error log the other day:

InnoDB: Warning: innodb_log_block_size has been changed
from default value 512. (###EXPERIMENTAL### operation)

This got me wanting to know more.

Basically, this variable changes the size of transaction log records. Generally, the default of 512 is a good value. However, it has been found that setting it to 4096 has been beneficial when using SSD cards. (Note that while it is possible to set this to a value other than 512 or 4096, those are currently the only 2 values that make sense to use.)

Also, it has been found that 4096 is the best setting if you run …

innodb_flush_method variable specifies how InnoDB opens and flushes log and data files. In Innodb optimization, setting the variable innodb_flush_method tweaks the performance most of the times but there are cases…

The post MySQL variable innodb_flush_method – summarized first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.