Archive for the ‘replication’ tag
Don’t forget about SHOW PROFILES
It seems that a lot of people want to try to improve MySQL performance by focusing on server status counters and configuration variables. Looking at counters, and “tuning the server,” is better than nothing, but only barely. You care first and foremost about how long it takes to execute a query, not about how many of this-and-that the server performs or about how big or small this-and-that buffer is. What you really need is timing information.
You can use the slow query log to find timing information about queries, and then you can examine those queries with SHOW PROFILES to see the timing information about the query’s execution itself.
This concept is very simple and absolutely fundamental: if you care about time (and you do!), then measure and optimize time. But it’s so often overlooked or misunderstood.
The addition of SHOW PROFILES was a major step forward in the ability to optimize server and application performance. (Thanks Jeremy Cole!) As time passes and people upgrade their servers, it’s becoming more common to see it in production, which is an enormous help. Now that the differences between the Community and Enterprise versions of the server have been erased, it will be available in all future server versions, which is great news.
MySQL replication breaks single-threaded limitation?
It’s a feature preview with many limitations, but this is still good news. This has been a pretty severe performance limitation for replication in MySQL, which has prompted many a workaround.
Interestingly, the feature preview is based on MySQL 5.1, which has recently seemed to be getting some significant changes even though it’s a GA release. Does this signal a change to MySQL’s release cycle, which has sometimes been characterized as too long? More good news?
Pop quiz: how can one slave break another slave
Suppose you have a MySQL master-slave replication setup. It is very straightforward, nothing exotic at all. Imagine that it is the simplest possible setup. Everything is fine, there is nothing wrong or misconfigured with either server.
Now you add another slave, and replication on your existing slave fails. You did not change anything on your existing slave or master. How did this happen?
