This post was originally published in June 2020 and was updated in September 2023.

While there is no magic bullet for MySQL performance tuning, there are a few areas that can be focused on upfront that can dramatically improve the performance of your MySQL installation. While much information has been published on this topic over the years, I wanted to break down some of the more critical settings that anyone can implement with no guesswork required.

Depending on the version of MySQL you are running, some of the default values used in this post may differ from your install, but the premise is still largely the same.

What are the Benefits of MySQL Performance Tuning?

MySQL performance tuning offers several significant advantages for effective database management and optimization. Let’s explore these benefits in …

As businesses grow and develop, the requirements that they have for their data platform grow along with it. As such, one of the more common questions I get from my clients is whether or not their system will be able to endure an anticipated load increase. Or worse yet, sometimes I get questions about regaining normal operations after a traffic increase caused performance destabilization.

As the subject of this blog post suggests, this all comes down to proper capacity planning. Unfortunately, this topic is more of an art than a science, given that there is really no foolproof algorithm or approach that can tell you exactly where you might hit a bottleneck with server performance. But we can discuss common bottlenecks, how to assess them, and have a better understanding as to why proactive monitoring is so important when it comes to responding to traffic growth.

Hardware considerations

The first thing we have to consider …

Restoring a MySQL database backup is a crucial task that can sometimes be time-consuming, especially for large databases. Monitoring the progress of the restore process is essential to estimate completion time and ensure everything is proceeding smoothly.

In this blog post, we will explore two distinct and effective methods to calculate the percentage progress of the MySQL restore process.

• Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics
• Pipe viewer utility

By following these approaches, we can effectively monitor the restoration process and manage your MySQL database restoration efficiently.

Monitoring MySQL database restore progress using Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics

We would use the /proc/<pid>/io file, which contains the IO statistics for each running process. For this particular case, we would use the pid of the MySQL restore process, which can provide …

Blip is a new MySQL monitor that collects and reports server metrics. But wasn’t this problem solved long ago? Not really…

Blip is a new MySQL monitor that collects and reports server metrics. But wasn’t this problem solved long ago? Not really…

2022 was an exciting year for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). We’ve added and improved many features, including Alerting and Backup Management. These updates are designed to keep databases running at peak performance and simplify database operations. But as companies grow and see more demand for their databases, we need to ensure that PMM also remains scalable so you don’t need to worry about its performance while tending to the rest of your environment.

PMM2 uses VictoriaMetrics (VM) as its metrics storage engine. Percona’s co-Founder Peter Zaitsev wrote a detailed post about migration from Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics, One of the most significant differences in …

Blip is a new open source MySQL metrics collector, or “MySQL monitor” for short. But isn’t collecting MySQL metrics easy? And don’t we already have some open source MySQL monitors? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Blip is a new open source MySQL metrics collector, or “MySQL monitor” for short. But isn’t collecting MySQL metrics easy? And don’t we already have some open source MySQL monitors? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Blip is a new open source MySQL metrics collector, or “MySQL monitor” for short. But isn’t collecting MySQL metrics easy? And don’t we already have some open source MySQL monitors? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Earlier in the year, I was working on an issue where one of my clients had reported a massive influx in connection on their hosts after enabling Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). This was something I had not seen before and after researching for a couple of days I discovered that if you monitor a MySQL instance with PMM configured to collect table statistics, and if the tables that it’s gathering statistics from are Federated, it will generate a connection on the remote host for the Federated tables, one for each Federated table in the instance. Let’s go over the details and provide some examples so we can understand this a bit better.

First, I’ll offer a reminder that a Federated table is simply a table that you can put in your MySQL instance that is empty locally and uses a network connection to get the data from …