On servers that are into the swap file and have multiple processes running, I often wonder if it’s MySQL that is in the swap or some other process.  With Linux this is a fairly easy thing to figure out.  Below is the format of a command to do just that:

echo 0 $(cat /proc/`pidof process`/smaps | grep TYPE | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's#^#+#') | bc

In the above command, TYPE refers to what type of Memory you want to examine.  Below are some of the options for this value:

Over on the codecentric blog I just published a new post on True KVM Live Migration with OpenStack Icehouse and Ceph based VM storage, outlining the process it took me to get this actually working. There were several issues to work around, some of them bugs in OpenStack, some of them home-grown issues.

I provide a few patches to OpenStack classes as well as a description of what is actually going wrong and how to circumvent the problems. So head right over and have fun reading :)

MySQL 5.7.6 brings in a simplification that solves the very first problem that I encountered back in the days when I first started using MySQL 5.0. Namely…

How do I create a new database instance?

I know it sounds like a very basic question. But as it turned out, the answer was not that simple. I tried mysqld --help. Nothing there. And then, after reading the manual and trying out the complex command line (including redirection) based steps a couple of times, I just resorted to employing the mysql-test-run.pl test suite driver to create the initial system tables and data for me.

Obviously this has …

Improving the performance of a web system involves knowledge of how the entire technology stack operates and interacts. There are many simple and common tips that can provide immediate improvements for a website. Some examples include:

• Using a CDN for assets
• Compressing content
• Making fewer requests (web, cache, database)
• Asynchronous management
• Optimizing your SQL statements
• Have more memory
• Using SSD’s for database servers
• Updating your software versions
• Adding more servers
• Configuring your software correctly
• … And the general checklist goes on

Understanding where to invest your energy first, knowing what the return on investment can be, and most importantly the measurement and verification of every change made is the difference between blind trial and error and a solid plan and process. …

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/2/9/534

Building on the original kSplice idea and combining the efforts of the work done at Red Hat and SuSE, common infrastructure is now ready to be put into the Linux 3.20 mainline kernel – Red Hat and SuSE have already committed to using this.

I still reckon it’s freaky trickery, but heck – it works, and it’s great for server environments that have no redundancy (I prefer to fix that issue!) and can’t afford any downtime.

Driven by popularity of previous post about Debian/Ubuntu builds of WebScaleSQL and long discussions during FOSDEM conference this weekend, PSCE engineering team decided to put even more effort into.

We would like to introduce:

• RPM packages available for download
• RedHat/CentOS repository

Architectures covered:

• x86 (32-bit)
• x86_64 (64-bit)

Please note that “WebScaleSQL does not currently maintain compatibility for anything except GNU/Linux x86_64.” (WebScaleSQL FAQ)”

RedHat/CentOS releases:

• CentOS 6
• CentOS 7

Packages can be downloaded from …

This article will explain the installation and usage of mytop, a handy tool for live monitoring of MySQL queries. Also looking into various operations that a user can perform while monitoring the queries on mytop.

I helped a charity to rebuild a MySQL server and to restore a database with a lot of data of longblob type in the last two days. Fortunately there was a dump backup file for the database in question.

However, tables with longblob column(s) were not defined with “ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED”. I’d like to restore that database with row compression before inserting the data. Therefore I need to modify the dump sql file. The problem is that the file is 2.5 GB and the server only has 4 GB memory. So editing it is a challenge. Fortunately, Linux has sed to save the day. Don’t you love open source free software?

I am power Vi/Vim user, so I am familiar with sed and have used it in the past. But there are still a few things that I searched around for quick answers. So I’ll record noteworthy points here. I couldn’t remember how many times my own past blog entries helped me over the years. And I hope you’ll find this helpful too! …

Debian/Ubuntu packaging sprint participants. From left: James Page, Norvald H. Ryeng, George Lorch, Akhil Mohan, Otto Kekäläinen, Robie Basak.

Last week, Canonical invited the MySQL packaging team in Debian to a packaging sprint in their London office, and most of us were able to participate. We’ve met online on IRC and UOSs before, but this was the first time we were all in the same room.

The results of our sprint will soon be available in a .deb near you. Since Debian Jessie is currently in feature freeze, most of it will hit Ubuntu first. The two main things we achieved on the MySQL side were to make MySQL 5.6 ready for Ubuntu Vivid (15.04) and to split MySQL, Percona and MariaDB configuration files. The configuration file split …

How to install osCommerce on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)

This document describes how to install osCommerce in Ubuntu 14.04. Open Source Commerce (osCommerce) is a popular e-Commerce and online store-management software program that may be easily used on any web server with PHP and MySQL installed. osCommerce is available to users as a free software under the General Public License (GNU) The versatile and fuss-free software enables easy setting up and maintenance of e-stores using minimal effort. This tutorial describes the process of installing osCommerce on Ubuntu 14.04.