MySQL 5.7.4 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.7, and is the “m14″ or “Milestone 14″ release), and is available for download here and here.

The 5.7.4 changelog begins with the following, so I felt it appropriate to include it here as well.

In Memoriam:

“This release is dedicated to the memory of two young engineers of the MySQL Engineering family, Astha and Akhila, whom we lost while they were in their early twenties. This is a small remembrance and a way to recognize your contribution to the 5.7 release. You will be missed.”

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.7/en/news-5-7-4.html

As for the fixes, there are …

In MySQL 5.6 InnoDB has a dedicated thread (page_cleaner) that’s responsible for performing flushing operations. Page_cleaner performs flushing of the dirty pages from the buffer pool based on two factors:
- access pattern  -  the least recently used pages will be flushed by LRU flusher from LRU_list when buffer pool has no free pages anymore;
- age – the oldest modified non-flushed pages are part of flush_list structure and will be flushed by flush_list flusher based on several heuristics.

There is a good overview of the page_cleaner and also here you may find some details about flushing in MySQL 5.6. Below I describe several additional aspects of the flush_list flushing that was not really …

In MySQL 5.6.2 we have introduced a new background thread named the page_cleaner in InnoDB. Adaptive flushing of modified buffer pool pages in the main background thread, async flushing by a foreground query thread if the log files are near to wrapping around, idle flushing and shutdown flushing are now moved to this thread, leaving only the last resort sync flushing in foreground query threads. We’ve also added counters for these activities.

As page_cleaner is all about the flushing of dirty pages to disk it’ll do you a world of good if you can go through this post where I have explained different types of flushing that happen inside InnoDB and the conditions that trigger flushing. The page_cleaner thread is only concerned with flush_list flushing (this may change in future releases). So let us dig a bit deeper into why …