If you’ve used MySQL’s mysqlbinlog tool, you’ve probably seen something like the following in the output: “exec_time=0″ What is the exec_time? It seems to be the query’s execution time, but it is not.

In most cases, the exec_time will be similar to the query execution time on the server where the query originally ran. If you’re running replication, then on the replication master, the exec_time will look believable. But on replicas, exec_time can be completely different. Suppose you execute an UPDATE that takes one second to run on the master. This gets logged into the binary log and copied to replicas for replay. Now suppose that you have also set log_slave_updates on the replica. When the statement executes in the replication thread, it will be logged to the replica’s binary log so it can be replicated to other servers in turn.

If you use mysqlbinlog to examine the replica’s binary log, you might see a very …