This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

NoSQL or Traditional Database: From an APM Perspective There Isn’t Really Much Difference

Author: Michael Kopp.

If your application is executing more statements or downloading more data than is necessary, no amount of backend tuning will have your site running at the highest level of performance. This article serves as a reminder that the application accessing the data can be …

MySQL performance can be increased in two ways, software optimization and hardware upgrades. While the previous articles have covered much of the software side of performance optimization, we are now going to focus on the hardware aspect. Does hardware help boost performance? Like software optimization, hardware upgrades for MySQL systems are based upon set goals for an organisation. The question is not what hardware would work best; rather a question of what hardware will help the organisation achieve an X goal. The answer is yes, hardware does boost performance, but there are a few caveats to this. There are cases such as organizations’ demands are fulfilled even with crappy hardware, and all they require is a performance boost on the software side. However, an organisation might have a goal plan for a major performance increase down the road, and …

I had to benchmark an EC2 instance to see whether a database could be safely moved to it. It is a good practice, which helps avoiding surprises when an instance or its storage are allocated in a noisy neighborhood, where the neighbors use so much resources that it affects the performance of our MySQL database. It is understandable that one can never get very reliable results on EC2, this is a shared environment after all, and that some fluctuations should be expected, however it is still good to know the numbers. I started my benchmarks and everything seemed fine at first, but then sometimes statistics I was getting started looking quite odd.

I was running the benchmarks on a High-CPU Extra Large Instance and couldn’t see any reliability in the results at all. I mean, in one moment I was getting poor throughput and horrible response times only to see it improve a lot a few minutes later. I ruled out a possibility that it could be …

This is the third blog post in the series of blog posts leading up to the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. This blog post is targeted at the join related optimizations introduced in the optimizer. These optimizations are available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5, and MariaDB 5.5 has introduced some additional optimizations which we will also look at, in this post.

Now let me briefly explain these optimizations.

Batched Key Access

Traditionally, MySQL always uses Nested Loop Join to join two or more tables. What this means is that, select rows from first table participating in the joins are read, and then for each of these rows an index lookup is performed on the second table. This means many point queries, say for example if table1 yields 1000 …

I have been working with Peter in preparation for the talk comparing the optimizer enhancements in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5. We are taking a look at and benchmarking optimizer enhancements one by one. So in the same way this blog post is aimed at a new optimizer enhancement Index Condition Pushdown (ICP). Its available in both MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 5.5

Now let’s take a look briefly at what this enhancement actually is, and what is it aimed at.

Index Condition Pushdown

Traditional B-Tree index lookups have some limitations in cases such as range scans, where index parts after the part on which range condition is applied cannot be used for filtering records. For example, suppose you have a key defined as:

KEY `i_l_partkey` …

MySQL has two confusingly identical by the first look variables myisam_sort_buffer_size and sort_buffer_size. Thing is that those two confusingly similar variables has absolutely different meanings.

sort_buffer_size is a per-connection variable and do not belongs to any specific storage engine. It doesn’t matter do you use MyISAM or InnoDB – MySQL will allocate sort_buffer_size for every sort (required most of the times for ORDER BY and GROUP BY queries) so increasing it’s value might help speeding up those queries however I would not recommend to change it from the default value unless you are absolutely sure about all the drawbacks. Value for out-of-the-box MySQL-5.1.41 installation on Ubuntu is 2Mb and it’s recommended to keep it that way.

On …

“I’ve installed MySQL and it doesn’t work fast enough for me”. MySQL server is heart of database driven application (if it uses MySQL as database of course!) and any slowness related to running queries is affecting all application layers.

MySQL server tuning and query slowness hunting are always step by step process and without knowing all the data (SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES, SHOW GLOBAL STATUS, SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE ‘tablename’, EXPLAIN details for slow query is just some of the required information) it would be generally a blind guess. But there are still few things which is related to newly installed MySQL server.

If you are using stock MySQL you might need to check memory pool size which MySQL used to load index data to avoid slow IO requests and increase queries speed. Connect to MySQL and fire two queries:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'key_buffer_size';
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE …

3 ways your MySQL migration project can shake you up

Once a development or operations team gets over the hurdle of open-source, and start to feel comfortable with the way software works outside of the enterprise world, they will likely start to settle in and feel comfortable.  Best not to get too cushy though for there are more surprises hiding around the corner.  Here are a few of the biggest ones.

1. Replication Is Not Perfect

Yes, you've installed MySQL, setup a slave, and got it replicating properly.  You check the slave and it's 0 seconds behind the master.  What's more you monitor the error log file, and have a check in place to alert you if something happens there.  Job completed, good job!

Not so fast.  Unfortunately this is not the end of the story.  Many MySQL replication slaves are not consistent with their masters, but they drift apart silently.  …

MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet.  They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook.  But these technologies don't run themselves.  When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem.  MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.

1. Use innotop

Innotop is a great tool for MySQL which despite the name monitors MySQL generally as well as InnoDB usage.  It's fairly easy to install, just download the perl script. Be sure to include a [client] section to your local users .my.cnf file (you have one don't you?).  Inside that section, place one line with "user=xyz" and one line with "password=abc".

If you're concerned that installing something new is too …

There are a lot of scalability challenges we see with clients over and over. The list could easily include 20, 50 or even 100 items, but we shortened it down to the biggest five issues we see.

1. Tune those queries

By far the biggest bang for your buck is query optimization. Queries can be functionally correct and meet business requirements without being stress tested for high traffic and high load. This is why we often see clients with growing pains, and scalability challenges as their site becomes more popular. This also makes sense. It wouldn't necessarily be a good use of time to tune a query for some page off in a remote corner of your site, that didn't receive real-world traffic. So some amount of reactive tuning is common and appropriate.

Enable the slow query log and watch it. Use …