This post was originally published in June 2020 and was updated in September 2023.

While there is no magic bullet for MySQL performance tuning, there are a few areas that can be focused on upfront that can dramatically improve the performance of your MySQL installation. While much information has been published on this topic over the years, I wanted to break down some of the more critical settings that anyone can implement with no guesswork required.

Depending on the version of MySQL you are running, some of the default values used in this post may differ from your install, but the premise is still largely the same.

What are the Benefits of MySQL Performance Tuning?

MySQL performance tuning offers several significant advantages for effective database management and optimization. Let’s explore these benefits in …

As businesses grow and develop, the requirements that they have for their data platform grow along with it. As such, one of the more common questions I get from my clients is whether or not their system will be able to endure an anticipated load increase. Or worse yet, sometimes I get questions about regaining normal operations after a traffic increase caused performance destabilization.

As the subject of this blog post suggests, this all comes down to proper capacity planning. Unfortunately, this topic is more of an art than a science, given that there is really no foolproof algorithm or approach that can tell you exactly where you might hit a bottleneck with server performance. But we can discuss common bottlenecks, how to assess them, and have a better understanding as to why proactive monitoring is so important when it comes to responding to traffic growth.

Hardware considerations

The first thing we have to consider …

Restoring a MySQL database backup is a crucial task that can sometimes be time-consuming, especially for large databases. Monitoring the progress of the restore process is essential to estimate completion time and ensure everything is proceeding smoothly.

In this blog post, we will explore two distinct and effective methods to calculate the percentage progress of the MySQL restore process.

• Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics
• Pipe viewer utility

By following these approaches, we can effectively monitor the restoration process and manage your MySQL database restoration efficiently.

Monitoring MySQL database restore progress using Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics

We would use the /proc/<pid>/io file, which contains the IO statistics for each running process. For this particular case, we would use the pid of the MySQL restore process, which can provide …

As a MySQL database administrator, keeping a close eye on the performance of your MySQL server is crucial to ensure optimal database operations. A monitoring tool like Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a popular choice among open source options for effectively monitoring MySQL performance.

However, simply deploying a monitoring tool is not enough; you need to know which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor to gain insights into your MySQL server’s health and performance.

In this blog, we will explore various MySQL KPIs that are basic and essential to track using monitoring tools like PMM. We will also discuss related configuration variables to consider that can impact these KPIs, helping you gain a comprehensive understanding of your MySQL server’s performance and efficiency.

Let’s dive in …

2022 was an exciting year for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). We’ve added and improved many features, including Alerting and Backup Management. These updates are designed to keep databases running at peak performance and simplify database operations. But as companies grow and see more demand for their databases, we need to ensure that PMM also remains scalable so you don’t need to worry about its performance while tending to the rest of your environment.

PMM2 uses VictoriaMetrics (VM) as its metrics storage engine. Percona’s co-Founder Peter Zaitsev wrote a detailed post about migration from Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics, One of the most significant differences in …

Recently I was working with a customer wherein our focus was to carry out a performance audit of their multiple MySQL database nodes. We started looking into the stats of the performance schema. While working, the customer raised two interesting questions: how can he make complete use of the performance schema, and how can he find what he requires? I realized that it is important to understand the insights of the performance schema and how we can make effective use of it. This blog should make it easier to understand for everyone.

The performance schema is an engine in MySQL which can easily be checked whether enabled or not using SHOW ENGINES. It is entirely built upon various sets of instruments (also can be called event names) each serving different purposes.

Instruments are the main part of the performance schema. It is useful when I want to investigate a problem and its root causes. Some of the examples are …

Earlier in the year, I was working on an issue where one of my clients had reported a massive influx in connection on their hosts after enabling Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). This was something I had not seen before and after researching for a couple of days I discovered that if you monitor a MySQL instance with PMM configured to collect table statistics, and if the tables that it’s gathering statistics from are Federated, it will generate a connection on the remote host for the Federated tables, one for each Federated table in the instance. Let’s go over the details and provide some examples so we can understand this a bit better.

First, I’ll offer a reminder that a Federated table is simply a table that you can put in your MySQL instance that is empty locally and uses a network connection to get the data from …

In my previous blog post, ProcFS UDF: A Different Approach to Agentless Operating System Observability in Your Database, I wrote about the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin, which allows you to get operating systems stats, through the MySQL database, without having shell access to the server and any local agent installation.

Some of you wondered whether there is a way to use this goodness in Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), and this blog post will show you exactly how to do that.

Unfortunately, at this point, Percona Monitoring and Management does not support the ProcFS UDF MySQL plugin out of the box. It is in the backlog, along with many other cool things. However, …

In this blog, I will demonstrate how to use Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) to find out the reason why the MySQL server is stalling. I will use only one typical situation for the MySQL server stall in this example, but the same dashboards, graphs, and principles will help you in all other cases.

Nobody wants it but database servers may stop handling connections at some point. As a result, the application will slow down and then will stop responding.

It is always better to know about the stall from a monitoring instrument rather than from your own customers.

PMM is a great help in this case. If you look at its graphs and notice that many of them started showing unusual behavior, you need to react. In the case of stalls, you will see that either some activity went to 0 or, otherwise, it increased to high …

In the previous posts of this series, I presented how the Percona Support team approaches the analysis and troubleshooting of a MySQL server using a tried-and-tested method supported by specific tools found in the Percona Toolkit:

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 1: The Percona Support Way

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 2: Knowing the Server

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 3: What MySQL?

Inspecting MySQL Servers Part 4: An Engine in …