In this blog post, we’ll look at does the Meltdown fix affect performance for MySQL on bare metal servers.

Since the news about the Meltdown bug, there were a lot of reports on the performance hit from proposed fixes. We have looked at how the fix affects MySQL (Percona Server for MySQL) under a sysbench workload.

In this case, we used bare metal boxes with the following specifications:

• Two-socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v3 @ 2.00GHz (in total 56 entries in /proc/cpuinfo)
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Memory: 256GB
• Storage: Samsung SM863 1.9TB SATA SSD
• Percona Server for MySQL 5.7.20
• Kernel (vulnerable) 4.13.0-21
• Kernel (with Meltdown fix) 4.13.0-25

Please note, the current kernel for Ubuntu 16.04 contains only a Meltdown fix, …

Having good historial metrics monitoring in place is critical for properly operating, maintaining and troubleshooting database systems, and Percona Monitoring and Management is one of the options we recommend to our clients for this.

One common concern among potential users is how using this may impact their database’s performance. As I could not find any conclusive information about this, I set out to do some basic tests and this post shows my results.

To begin, let me describe my setup. I used the following Google Cloud instances:

• One 4 vCPU instance for the MySQL server
• One 2 vCPU instance for the sysbench client
• One 1 vCPU instance for the PMM server

I used Percona Server 5.7 and PMM 1.5.3 installed via Docker. Slow query log was enabled with long_query_time set to 0 …

Cloud-based Relational Database Services (RDS) offer businesses a variety of traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) with several management and configuration options. In the Top 10 Things to Know about Amazon RDS blog, we covered Amazon RDS. In today’s article, we’ll be presenting Alibaba Cloud RDS. If you’ve been considering moving some or all of your database infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud RDS, or any Cloud RDS for that matter, there are many things to consider. Here are the top 10 things you need to know before taking the plunge.

About Alibaba Cloud RDS

Alibaba Cloud RDS, whose full name is Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for RDS, is an on-demand database service that handles some of the administrative tasks associated with managing a database, thus leaving you with more time to focus on your core business. …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how ioping can be used with other tools to understand and troubleshoot storage performance, specifically as it relates to MySQL workloads.

I recently ran into ioping, a nice little utility by Konstantin Khlebnikov that checks storage latency.  

For me, the main beauty of ioping is its simplicity and familiarity. It takes after the ubiquitous ping tool, but “pings” the storage instead of the network device.

First, let’s talk about what this tool isn’t: it isn’t a benchmark tool to stress load your storage as heavily as possible. For that, you can use iozone or sysbench (among many others). This also isn’t a tool for looking at …

Thank you for attending my webinar on Wednesday, December 20, 2017, InnoDB Performance Optimization. In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the webinar.

Are the T2 CPUs similar to the M4 series?

I would expect them to be similar. Amazon does not disclose what specific version of CPUs they use for T2 instances. More details are available here.

Delay in spinlock code is pretty old code. Need to optimize based on today’s CPU? Your views?

There have been a number of improvements to the InnoDB Spinlock code during the last few years. For example, using CPU wait …

Important notice: With this release, we have changed the registration keys. As usual, the new keys are available for registered users from our Customer Portal.

Monyog MySQL Monitor v8.4.0 adds more alert and logging options and enhances the MONyog API. Further, we redesigned the settings page and a number of bugs were fixed.

Changes as compared to Monyog MySQL Monitor v8.3.2 include: Features:

Added more notification channels (Slack and Pagerduty) for Monyog alerts. (Read more) Option to write Monyog alerts in the Syslog of the machine where Monyog is installed. This option is only available for Linux. Option to edit the subject line for Monyog alerts. Added MONyog API to disable notification for a monitor based on a server/tag. ( …

After upgrading some of our slaves to latest 5.7, I have found  what looks like a serious regression introduced in MySQL 5.7.
A couple weeks ago I noticed that the error log file of one of our clusters, where I had implemented my in place transparent compression of binary logs,  was literally flooded by the following error:

[ERROR] Binlog has bad magic number;  It's not a binary log file that can be used by this version of MySQL

In the above setup this is  an harmless error, and it should only happen at server startup, where mysqld opens and reads all available binary log files.  The error is due to the fact that since files are now compressed, mysqld doesn't recognize them as valid - not an issue, as only older files are compressed, and only after …

Semi-sync Replication is a plugin available for mysql which allows you to create more durable replication topologies.  For instance you can ensure that in the event of a master crash that at least one of your replicas has all transaction currently written to the master so that when you promote, you know you're not missing any data.

That's a huge simplification.

What's the downside?  Write speed.  If a transaction on your master have to wait until a replica acknowledges it has that transaction, then there is going to be some delay.  Not only that, but your network latency between the two points matters a lot.  If you want greater durability, the cost is performance.

It's important to note that the master doesn't wait until the replica actually runs the transaction on the …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud platform that offers a wide variety of services including computing power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality that targets businesses of all sizes. One of their database solutions includes the Amazon Relational Database Service. Amazon RDS includes a number of popular RDBMSes, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as tools to manage your databases and monitor their performance.

Despite the wide range of metrics available within the Amazon RDS console, there are some very good reasons for using your own monitoring tool(s) instead or in addition to those offered by Amazon RDS. For example, familiarity with your own tool(s) or access to features that Amazon RDS does not provide would constitute two persuasive reasons for employing a local tool.

With traditional software monitoring platforms such as Monyog still enjoying …

With Halloween all but a distant memory, the time has come to turn our attention to the upcoming holiday season. First, Thanksgiving, then Black Friday and Cyber Monday, culminating in the Christmas/boxing week shopping bonanza. For business owners, this time of the year marks the long-awaited year’s end profit taking. For some DBA’s, it brings fear, trepidation, and even sleepless nights toiling away to bring systems back online.

Thankfully, this need not be the case. With a little proactive tweaking of MySQL performance variables, you can insulate your database server(s) against the onslaught of increased demand that the shopping season brings.

Tip #1: Determine the Maximum Number of MySQL Connections

A good starting estimate for the maximum number connections on MySQL is one for every five requests to your web server. A few of those five requests to your web server will be for resources like CSS style sheets, …