Xaprb

As announced on the Maatkit and Aspersa mailing lists, Daniel and I have created a new toolkit that represents the union of the two, and will be focusing efforts on this Percona Toolkit moving forward. The goal is to make them simpler and significantly more powerful, and to create more tools. The tools will continue to be open-source, but will be developed primarily to meet our MySQL support and consulting staff’s needs.

If you’re interested in challenging software engineering in Perl and shell, then please apply online. You can work online from anywhere, but I strongly prefer someone in the Americas timezones.

I’ve just sent an email to the Maatkit discussion list to announce a planned change to how Maatkit (and Aspersa) are developed. In short, Percona plans to create a Percona Toolkit of MySQL-related utilities, as a fork of Maatkit and Aspersa. I’m very happy about this change, and I welcome your responses to that thread on the discussion list.

I’ve just committed some changes to diskstats, an I/O analysis tool in Aspersa that’s actually been in the Subversion repository for a long time, but in a barely usable fashion and with no documentation. Now it’s usable and documented.

It is basically a reimplementation of iostat in awk. Why on earth would I reinvent that wheel? Because I spend a lot of time gathering and analyzing raw data from /proc/diskstats, which is vital to really understanding what the storage subsystem is doing. The iostat tool hides important details. Seeing that detail has immediately solved many a disk performance problem and proven SAN vendors wrong, for instance. (I used to do this the old-fashioned way.) Disk performance, of course, is one of the most important things to analyze in a database server that’s struggling.

Also, iostat isn’t interactive, and I wanted an interactive, menu-driven tool to quickly slice and dice the data and drill down into what is happening with I/O. The data it accepts is in the same format as that stored by the stalk and collect tools, which is my default post-mortem toolset. And finally — and I know this might be hard to believe — I’ve been asked to fix problems many times on systems that don’t have iostat and I am not allowed to install it.

And wouldn’t you know it, as I wrote the user’s manual I found a bug, after all my ranting about how other tools show I/O stats wrong. I don’t have time to diagnose or fix the bug right now, so maybe someone else can contribute that. There is a test suite (remind me to explain sometime how I make Bash scripts highly testable) so if we find the problem and fix it, it’ll stay fixed. Contribute your fix to the bug report :-)