In my work on group commit for MariaDB, I have the following situation:

A group of threads are going to participate in group commit. This means that one of the threads, called the group leader, will run an fsync() for all of them, while the other threads wait. Once the group leader is done, it needs to wake up all of the other threads.

The obvious way to do this is to have the group leader call pthread_cond_broadcast() on a condition that the other threads are waiting for with pthread_cond_wait():

  bool wakeup= false;
  pthread_cond_t wakeup_cond;
  pthread_mutex_t wakeup_mutex

Waiter:

  pthread_mutex_lock(&wakeup_mutex);
  while (!wakeup)
    pthread_cond_wait(&wakeup_cond, &wakeup_mutex);
  pthread_mutex_unlock(&wakeup_mutex);
  // Continue processing after group commit …

Working on a new set of replication APIs in MariaDB, I have given some thought to the generation of replication events on the master server.

But there is another side of the equation: to apply the generated events on a slave server. This is something that most replication setups will need (unless they replicate to non-MySQL/MariaDB slaves). So it will be good to provide a generic interface for this, otherwise every binlog-like plugin implementation will have to re-invent this themselves.

A central idea in the current design for generating events is that we do not enforce a specific content of events. Instead, the API provides accessors for a lot of different information related to each event, allowing the plugin flexibility in choosing what to include in a …

For the replication project that I am currently working on in MariaDB, I wanted to understand exactly what information is needed to do full replication of all MySQL/MariaDB statements on the level of completeness that existing replication does. So I went through the code, and this is what I found.

What I am after here is a complete list of what the execution engine needs to provide to have everything that a replication system needs to be able to completely replicate all changes made on a master server. But not anything specific to the particular implementation of replication used, like binlog positions or replication event disk formats, etc.

The basic information needed is of course the query (for statement-based replication), or the column values (for row-based replication). But there are lots of extra details needed, especially for statement-based …

(No three-part series is complete without a part 4, right?)

Here is an analogy that describes well what group commit does. We have a bus driving back and forth transporting people from A to B (corresponding to fsync() "transporting" commits to durable storage on disk). The group commit optimisation is to have the bus pick up everyone that is waiting at A before driving to B, not drive people one by one. Makes sense, huh? :-)

It is pretty obvious that this optimisation of having more than one person in the bus can dramatically improve throughput, and it is the same for the group commit optimisation. Here is a graph from a benchmark comparing stock MariaDB 5.1 vs. MariaDB patched …

This is the third and final article in a series about group commit in MySQL. The first article discussed the background: group commit in MySQL does not work when the binary log is enabled. The second article explained the part of the InnoDB code that is responsible for the problem.

So how do we fix group commit in MySQL? As we saw in the second article of this series, we can just eliminate the prepare_commit_mutex from InnoDB, extend the binary logging to do group commit by itself, and that would solve the problem.

However, we might be able to do even better. As explained in the first article, with …

This is the second in a series of three articles about ideas for implementing full support for group commit in MariaDB. The first article discussed the background: group commit in MySQL does not work when the binary log is enabled. See also the third article.

Internally, InnoDB (and hence XtraDB) do support group commit. The way this works is seen in the innobase_commit() function. The work in this function is split into two parts. First, a "fast" part, which registers the commit in memory:

    trx->flush_log_later = TRUE;
    innobase_commit_low(trx);
    trx->flush_log_later = FALSE;

Second, a "slow" part, which writes and fsync's the commit to disk to make it durable:

    trx_commit_complete_for_mysql(trx)

While …

This is the first in a series of three articles about ideas for implementing full support for group commit in MariaDB (for the other parts see the second and third articles). Group commit is an important optimisation for databases that helps mitigate the latency of physically writing data to permanent storage. Group commit can have a dramatic effect on performance, as the following graph shows:

The rising blue and yellow lines show transactions per second when group commit is working, showing greatly improved throughput as the parallelism (number of concurrently running transactions) increases. The flat red and green lines show transactions per second with no group commit, with no scaling at all as parallelism increases. As can be seen, the effect of group commit on …

I had an interesting IRC discussion the other day with Monty Taylor about what turned out to be a limitation in Valgrind with respect to debugging memory leaks in dynamically loaded plugins.

Monty Taylor's original problem was with Drizzle, but as it turns out, it is common to all of the MySQL-derived code bases. When there is a memory leak from an allocation in a dynamically loaded plugin, Valgrind will detect the leak, but the part of the stack trace that is within the plugin shows up as an unhelpful three question marks "???":

==1287== 400 bytes in 4 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 5 of 8
==1287==    at 0x4C22FAB: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:207)
==1287==    by 0x126A2186: ???
==1287==    by 0x7C8E01: ha_initialize_handlerton(st_plugin_int*) (handler.cc:429)
==1287==    by 0x88ADD6: plugin_initialize(st_plugin_int*) …

Earlier this month, I was at the OpenSourceDays 2010 conference, giving a talk on MariaDB (the slides from the talk are available).

The talk went quite well I think (though I probably talked way too fast as I usually do; at least that means that I finished on time with plenty room for questions..)

There was quite a bit of interest after the talk from many of the people who heard it. It was even reported on by the Danish IT media version2.dk (article in Danish).

Especially interesting to me was to discuss with three people from Danish site komogvind.dk, who told me fascinating details about their work …

It is conference time for me. I just came home from FOSDEM 2010 where we had a booth and I gave a talk. At the end of the month there will be a company meeting in Iceland for Monty Program, followed by Open Source Days 2010 where I will also be speaking. And then in April there is the MySQL User Conference. With two additional talks given at local user groups end of last year, I think I've about filled my quota for now, I feel quite fortunate that it turned out that I will not also be presenting at the UC! (I do not have a natural talent for speaking, and tend to need to spend quite a lot of time in preparations.)

Having a booth at FOSDEM turned out really well I think, as I got to talk to a lot of different people that passed by the booth. I also had a very nice …