Last night a customer had an emergency in selected machines on a large cluster of quite uniform database servers. Some of the servers were slowing down in a very puzzling way over a short time span (a couple of hours). Queries were taking multiple seconds to execute instead of being practically instantaneous. But nothing seemed to have changed. No increase in traffic, no code changes, nothing. Some of the servers got sick and then well again; others that seemed to be identical were still sick; others hadn’t shown any symptoms yet. The servers were in master-master pairs, and the reads were being served entirely from the passive machine in the pair. The servers that were having trouble were the active ones, those accepting writes.
The customer had graphs of system metrics (++customer), and the symptoms we observed were that Open_tables went sharply up, the buffer pool got more dirty pages, InnoDB started creating more pages, and the …
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