Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on Dec 20, 2011 by Vasil Dimov.

Last month we did a few improvements in InnoDB memory usage. We solved a challenging issue about how InnoDB uses memory in certain places of the code.

The symptom of the issue was that under a certain workloads the memory used by InnoDB kept growing infinitely, until OOM killer kicked in. It looked like a memory leak, but Valgrind wasn’t reporting any leaks and the issue was not reproducible on FreeBSD – it only happened on Linux (see Bug#57480). Especially the latest fact lead us to think that there is something in the InnoDB memory usage pattern that reveals a …

Last month we did a few improvements in InnoDB memory usage. We solved a challenging issue about how InnoDB uses memory in certain places of the code.

The symptom of the issue was that under a certain workloads the memory used by InnoDB kept growing infinitely, until OOM killer kicked in. It looked like a memory leak, but Valgrind wasn’t reporting any leaks and the issue was not reproducible on FreeBSD – it only happened on Linux (see Bug#57480). Especially the latest fact lead us to think that there is something in the InnoDB memory usage pattern that reveals a nasty side of the otherwise good-natured Linux’s memory manager.

It turned out to be an interesting …

In the 5.6.4 release it is now possible to create an InnoDB database with 4k or 8k page sizes in addition to the original 16k page size. Previously, it could be done by recompiling the engine with a different value for UNIV_PAGE_SIZE_SHIFT and UNIV_PAGE_SIZE. With this release, you can set –innodb-page-size=n when starting mysqld, or put innodb_page_size=n in the configuration file in the [mysqld] section where n can be 4k, 8k, 16k, or 4096, 8192, 16384.

The support of smaller page sizes may be useful for certain storage media such as SSDs. Performance results can vary depending on your data schema, record size, and read/write ratio. But this provides you more options to optimize your performance.

When this new setting is used, the page size is set for all tablespaces used by that InnoDB instance. You can query the current value with;

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘innodb_page_size’;
or
SELECT variable_value …

It’s almost the end of the year – that means holiday cards, shopping, cooking, parties, and the inevitable year-end top lists (including gems like this one).

In the spirit of end of year list making, we fed our 60+ blogs this year through Google Analytics to find out what our own top ten blogs were (outside of product announcements). So if you missed an episode of the View (TokuView that is) we’ve got a Tokutek Top Ten for you (spoiler alert – they are mostly technical):

10. Cage Match: OldSQL, NoSQL and NewSQL – References to mud …

I am pleased to announce that the MySQL Database 5.6.4 development milestone release ("DMR") is now available for download (select the Development Release tab). MySQL 5.6.4 includes all 5.5 production-ready features and provides an aggreation of all of the new features that have been released in earlier 5.6 DMRs.  5.6.4 adds many bug fixes and more new "early and often" enhancements that are development and system QA complete and ready for Community evaluation and feedback.  You can get the complete rundown of all the new 5.6.4 specific features here.

For those following the progression of the 5.6 DMRs as the trains leave the station, you should bookmark these MySQL …

I am pleased to announce that the MySQL Database 5.6.4 development milestone release ("DMR") is now available for download (select the Development Release tab). MySQL 5.6.4 includes all 5.5 production-ready features and provides an aggreation of all of the new features that have been released in earlier 5.6 DMRs.  5.6.4 adds many bug fixes and more new "early and often" enhancements that are development and system QA complete and ready for Community evaluation and feedback.  You can get the complete rundown of all the new 5.6.4 specific features here.

For those following the progression of the 5.6 DMRs as the trains leave the station, you should bookmark these MySQL …

The slides of my talk on B+Tree Indexes and InnoDB are now available for download. This slide was presented during Percona Live London 2011. You can download the slides from here.
There are many other interesting and informative talks that were presented during Percona Live London 2011, and I think you should definitely check them out, if you haven't. They are available here.

The post Slides of my talk on B+Tree Indexes and InnoDB appeared first on ovais.tariq.

I recently wrote an article on dealing with an assertion failure in log/log0recv.c, specifically !page || (ibool)!!page_is_comp(page) == dict_table_is_comp(index->table).

I mention it because this occurred after a system outage, and I just encountered another system outage (either HDD power outage or some other serious HDD event), with a completely different assertion failure and error message. Similar to the one above, it’s also kind of obscure, so I wanted to post this so people searching for it will find this.

For reference, the first outage assertion failure was this:

InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 139838283589376 in file
log/log0recv.c line 1094
InnoDB: Failing assertion: !page || (ibool)!!page_is_comp(page) ==
dict_table_is_comp(index->table)

Here is the new assertion failure:

111201 16:45:00 InnoDB: Assertion failure in …

I’m often wondering what version of the InnoDB Plugin is included with which version of MySQL (or MariaDB). The MySQL changelogs used to denote which version of the InnoDB plugin was included with that particular release of MySQL, but sadly this is no longer the case.

Therefore I’ve compiled a comprehensive list which contains all of this info, and then some (and note all InnoDB Plugin changelog links are provided at the bottom).

Hope you find it helpful

MySQL 5.6:

At ideeli, we use a variety of techniques to eliminate single points of failure and contention. These involve load balancing multiple application servers, caching layers, and calls to asynchronous services. However, at the end of the day we have a single master MySQL database. It doesn’t matter how many dozens of application servers are handling requests if the database is stalled. Without the right tools, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the database is doing at any given time. In this two part post, I will discuss some techniques for finding those problematic queries.

FINDING THE SLOW STUFF

The MySQL slow query log should be the first stop when looking for queries to optimize. Even with tools like mysqldumpslow, the format of the …