Profiling mysql on two different servers - mysql

I have two mysql databases that are identical. One is running locally and one is running on a production server. The one that runs locally is consistently 3x faster on all queries, even though the production server is larger more memory and better CPU than my local machine.
I did SHOW PROFILES and it doesn't show anything definitive, most of the items are the same, though sometimes the local machine is ~10-20% better. How would I determine where this difference is coming from? Perhaps it has to do with networking performance, but I'm not sure how I would profile that with mysql queries.
What would you suggest as to how to figure this out and improve the production db performance?

Profile the query to see where the time is being spent. A long "sending data" stage will show if it's network latency.
Always use SQL_NO_CACHE when measuring query time.

Related

Which would be more efficient, having each user create a database connection, or caching?

I'm not sure if caching would be the correct term for this but my objective is to build a website that will be displaying data from my database.
My problem: There is a high probability of a lot of traffic and all data is contained in the database.
My hypothesized solution: Would it be faster if I created a separate program (in java for example) to connect to the database every couple of seconds and update the html files (where the data is displayed) with the new data? (this would also increase security as users will never be connecting to the database) or should I just have each user create a connection to MySQL (using php) and get the data?
If you've had any experiences in a similar situation please share, and I'm sorry if I didn't word the title correctly, this is a pretty specific question and I'm not even sure if I explained myself clearly.
Here are some thoughts for you to think about.
First, I do not recommend you create files but trust MySQL. However, work on configuring your environment to support your traffic/application.
You should understand your data a little more (How much is the data in your tables change? What kind of queries are you running against the data. Are your queries optimized?)
Make sure your tables are optimized and indexed correctly. Make sure all your query run fast (nothing causing a long row locks.)
If your tables are not being updated very often, you should consider using MySQL cache as this will reduce your IO and increase the query speed. (BUT wait! If your table is being updated all the time this will kill your server performance big time)
Your query cache is set to "ON". Based on my experience this is always bad idea unless your data does not change on all your tables. When you have it set to "ON" MySQL will cache every query. Then as soon as they data in the table changes, MySQL will have to clear the cached query "it is going to work harder while clearing up cache which will give you bad performance." I like to keep it set to "ON DEMAND"
from there you can control which query should be cache and which should not using SQL_CACHE and SQL_NO_CACHE
Another thing you want to review is your server configuration and specs.
How much physical RAM does your server have?
What types of Hard Drives are you using? SSD is not at what speed do they rotate? perhaps 15k?
What OS are you running MySQL on?
How is the RAID setup on your hard drives? "RAID 10 or RAID 50" will help you out a lot here.
Your processor speed will make a big different.
If you are not using MySQL 5.6.20+ you should consider upgrading as MySQL have been improved to help you even more.
How much RAM does your server have? is your innodb_log_buffer_size set to 75% of your total physical RAM? Are you using innodb table?
You can also use MySQL replication to increase the read sources of the data. So you have multiple servers with the same data and you can point half of your traffic to read from server A and the other half from Server B. so the same work will be handled by multiple server.
Here is one argument for you to think about: Facebook uses MySQL and have millions of hits per seconds but they are up 100% of the time. True they have trillion dollar budget and their network is huge but the idea here is to trust MySQL to get the job done.

Amazon Linux EC2 Webserver / MYSQL Upgrade – Traffic causing error establishing a database connection

To give you a little background, I currently have a website that allows users to upload photos. The website was initially on a GoDaddy shared server, but recent surges in traffic have forced me to explore other options. During peak hours, the site contains 400+ active visitors, which when combined with user uploads, forces the shared server to shut down.
I have a small amount of experience with setting up servers through AWS and attempted to place the website on a c1.medium instance, Amazon Linux. The website along with the MYSQL Database is on the same instance. While I have read that this is in general frowned upon, I have similarly read that moving the database to another instance would not significantly increase speeds. Unfortunately, the c1.medium instance also was unable to support the traffic and I soon received an error Establishing a Database connection. The site does load on occasion, so the problem stems from the traffic load and not an actual problem with the database.
My question is whether the problem revolves solely around MySQL? The database itself when backed up is around 250MB. Is the issue caused by input / output requests to the database? I read posts with people with similar problems in which they stated that installing MySQL 5.6 solved the problem, but also have read that MySQL 5.6 is slower than MySQL 5.5, which is my current version.
After conducting some preliminary research I started to believe that I could resolve the problem by increasing the IPOS of the EBS. Originally I had it set the IPOS as standard, but changed it to Provisioned IOPS and 30x the size of the EBS (i.e., 60GB – 1800 IOPS). This once again appeared to have little impact. Do I need to upgrade my instance? What measures should I be focused on when deciding on the instance? It appears that the cheapest instance with high network performance and EBS optimized would be c3.xlarge. Suggestions?
Several things to consider:
1)Separate the database server from the web server
Your database should not share resources with your web server. They will both perform poorly as the result.
It is easier to find what the bottle-neck is.
2) Upgrade to MySQL 5.6
In all the benchmarks that I have seen and done 5.6 performs better than 5.5
3) Configure your database to take advantage of your resources
Depending on the storage engine and the memory allocated in your machine configure MySQL for example set innodb_buffer_pool_size to 70% of the (DEDICATED) RAM
4) Monitor MySQL and check slow query log
Slow query log shows the queries that are slow and inefficient
5) Learn to use EXPLAIN
EXPLAIN shows query plan in MySQL run EXPLAIN on slow queries to tune them
6) Use Key-Value Stores to Cache queries
Using Memcached or Redis cache queries so they don't hit your database and return repeated queries from the memory
7) Increasing IOPS and Scaling Out
Increasing IOPS and getting better hardware helps but using efficient queries is much more effective. Queries and application most of the time are a greater contributing factor to performance problems
8) Replication
To help with concurrency consider moving to a MySQL Master/Slave replication , if you still had issues.
Final Note: use EBS because the storage on EC2 is ephemeral and will not persistent.
We recently did extensive research on the performance bottlenecks associated with massive end-user peaks across our global customer base, and the analysis actually indicates the database as - by far - the most frequent cause of slowdowns or even crashes. The report (https://queue-it.com/trend-report) includes best practice advice from our customers on how to improve the situation, which you may find helpful.

mysql performance benchmark

I'm thinking about moving our production env from a self hosted solution to amazon aws. I took a look at the different services and thought about using RDS as replacement for our mysql instances. The hardware we're using for our master seems to be better than the best hardware we can get when using rds (Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance). Since I can't simply move our production env to aws and see if the performance is still good enough I'd love to make some tests in advance.
I thought about creating a full query log from our current master, configure the rds instance and start to replay the full query log against it. Actually I don't even know if this kind of testing is a good idea but I guess you'll tell me if there are better ways to make sure the performance of mysql won't drop dramatically when making the move to rds.
Is there a preferred tool to replay the full query log?
at what metrics should I take a look while running the test
cpu usage?
memory usage?
disk usage?
query time?
anything else?
Thanks in advance
I'd recommend against replaying the query log - it's almost certainly not going to give you the information you want, and will take a significant amount of effort.
Firstly, you'd need to prepare your database so that replaying the query log won't break constraints when inserting, updating or deleting data, and that subsequent "select" queries will find the records they should find. This is distinctly non-trivial on anything other than a toy database - just taking a back-up and replaying the log doesn't necessarily guarantee the ordering of DML statements will match what happened on production. This may well give you a false sense of comfort - all your select statements return in a few milliseconds, because the data they're looking for doesn't exist!
Secondly, load and performance testing rarely works by replaying what happened on production - that doesn't (usually) reflect the peak conditions that will bring your system to its knees. For instance, most production systems run happily most of the time at <50% capacity, but go through spikes during the day, when they might reach 80% or more of capacity - that's what you care about, can your new environment handle the peaks.
My recommendation would be to use a tool like JMeter to write performance scripts (either directly to the database using the JDBC driver, or through the front end if you've got a web appilcation). Your performance scripts should reflect the behaviour you see from users, and be parameterized so they're not dependent on the order in which records are created.
Set yourself some performance targets (ideally based on current production levels, with a multiplier to cover you against spikes), e.g. "100 concurrent users, with no query taking more than 1 second"), and use JMeter to simulate that load. If you reach it first time, congratulations - go home! If not, look at the performance counters to see where the bottleneck is; see if you can alleviate that bottleneck (or tune your queries, your awesome on-premise hardware may be hiding some performance issues). Typical bottlenecks are CPU, RAM, and disk I/O.
Experiment with different test scenarios - "lots of writes", "lots of reads", "lots of reporting queries", and mix them up.
The idea is to understand the bottlenecks on the system, and see how far you are from those bottleneck, and understand what you can do to alleviate them. Once you know that, your decision to migrate will be far more robust.

Data queries and computation happen in MySQL server or Rails server?

I need to run a long backend job with long MySQL queries regularly, which will take several hours to complete. I set up Delayed Job gem to schedule this job.
When this process is running:
Will this job slow down my Rails front-end server (i.e., it will take much longer to response to a simple user's request)?
Where heavy computation happens: in my Rails server, or in MySQL server?
Will MySQL server be occupied by my scheduled job, and no one can access MySQL at the same time?
Thank you.
The answer to your question is: It depends
If your task is processor intensive it could slow down the rails server. If you are concerned about the DJ workers impacting the front end box, move them to another box with access to a shared DB. Your worker box needs the project setup but does not need to be the same box you are serving pages from.
This is completely dependent on how you wrote your task. Typically a rails app does simple select / insert / update / delete. the actual computation is done in rails. But you can specify select statements that involve complex joins or take advantage of functions in the DB. This can offload the computation of complex fields to the DB
This is dependent on the number of connections your DB is configured to accept. Typically in a production level server, you wouldn't see an issue here from the size of your query. But you should take into account how many active connections there are and how many are permitted. Each rails instance counts as a connection, as well as each worker for DJ.
In each case the actual performance is going to depend on several factors. How many connections are you creating, how much data are you transmitting between worker and DB. Where are you doing the work.
If the rails server is on the same machine as the mysql server, then there will be some impact. But your OS, and MySQL together, are pretty capable of minimizing the effects without much other intervention by you. Depending how you're deployed, you can always utilize the 'nice' command, and lower the priority of the delayed job, minimizing it's impact on your site's responsiveness.

MySQL performance - 100Mb ethernet vs 1Gb ethernet

I've just started a new job and noticed that the analysts computers are connected to the network at 100Mbps. The ODBC queries we run against the MySQL server can easily return 500MB+ and it seems at times when the servers are under high load the DBAs kill low priority jobs as they are taking too long to run.
My question is this... How much of this server time is spent executing the request, and how much time is spent returning the data to the client? Could the query speeds be improved by upgrading the network connections to 1Gbps?
(Updated for the why): The database in question was built to accomodate reporting needs and contains massive amounts of data. We usually work with subsets of this data at a granular level in external applications such as SAS or Excel, hence the reason for the large amounts of data being transmitted. The queries are not poorly structured - they are very simple and the appropriate joins/indexes etc are being used. I've removed 'query' from the Title of the post as I realised this question is more to do with general MySQL performance rather than query related performance. I was kind of hoping that someone with a Gigabit connection may be able to actually quantify some results for me here by running a query that returns a decent amount of data, then they could limit their connection speed to 100Mb and rerun the same query. Hopefully this could be done in an environment where loads are reasonably stable so as not to skew the results.
If ethernet speed can improve the situation I wanted some quantifiable results to help argue my case for upgrading the network connections.
Thanks
Rob
Benchmark. MySQL has many tools for determining how long queries take. Odds are you have really bad queries. Use the slow query log.
Why are you transmitting/storing 500MB of data from/in MySQL?
Divide the amount of data by the time of your query, you'll get your answer. If you're nearing the capacity of 100Mbps , you'll have IO problems.
My suspicion is yes. It should be.
In the MySQL shell, I would run:
show full processlist
on the machine and check out the state of the queries. If you see any states similar to: "reading from net" or "writing to net" that would imply that network transmission is directly impacting MySQL. You can also look at IOStat results to see how much IO the system is using. If the system is on a managed switch, you might also want to check the load there.
Ref: show processlist
Ref: Status definitions