How to free up space in a MySQL Amazon RDS instance - mysql

We are using an Amazon RDS instance and it ran out of free storage space. Looking into the issue we dropped a no-longer required table. Amazon's monitoring tool showed that 1Gb of space was now available.
Further investigation showed that another table had 7 million entries, so we removed 5 million of them (using a simple delete command). However now the Free Storage Space has dropped to almost 1/2 Gb. We are dangerously close to running out of space again.
I (naively) assumed that deleting entries from a table would reclaim space. Why is this not the case? Do I need to perform some form of manual cleanup operation? Why did performing the delete cause nearly 1/2 Gb of free space to be used (looking at the table the size was 2677Mb before the delete and is now 2961Mb!)
Thanks,
Phil

You may have unused indexes in your database which maybe taking up space. Percona makes tools and patches for MySQL to collect index usage data.
Check these links:
User statistics(index statistics
pt-index usage
You can also have a look at these:
New table_io_waits_summary_by_index_usage table in performance_schema in MySQL 5.6
New INDEX_STATISTICS table in the information_schema
I'll recommend to use performance schema provided you use MySQL version 5.6 or higher. Also you can have look at MONyog- Mysql Monitoring tool. It include tools to monitor different performance metrics of the MySQL server, there's a disk info feature in it which might help you in this issue.

Related

How to reduce the startup time for MySQL 5.7 with many databases?

I have MySQL 5.7.24 running on a Windows VM. It has a few thousand databases (7000). I understand this is not the recommended set up for MySQL but some business requirements have necessitated this multi-tenant db structure and I cannot change that unfortunately.
The server works fine when it is running but the startup time can get pretty long, almost 20-30 mins after a clean shutdown of the MySQL service and 1+ hours after a restart of the Windows VM.
Is there any way to reduce the startup time?
In my configuration, I observed that innodb_file_per_table = ON (which is the default for MySQL 5.7 I believe) and so I think that at startup it is scanning every .ibd file.
Would changing innodb_file_per_table = OFF and then altering each table to get rid of the .ibd files be a viable option. One thing to note is that in general, every database size is pretty small and even with 7000 databases, the total size of the data is about 60gb only. So to my understanding, innodb_file_per_table = ON is more beneficial when there are single tables that can get pretty large which is not the case for my server.
Question: Is my logic reasonable and could this innodb_file_per_table be the reason for the slow startup? Or is there some other config variable that I can change so that each .ibd file is not scanned before the server starts accepting connections.
Any help to guide me in the right direction would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
You should upgrade to MySQL 8.0.
I was working on a system with the same problem as yours. In our case, we had about 1500 schemas per MySQL instance, and a little over 100 tables per schema. So it was about 160,000+ tables per instance. It caused lots of problems trying to use innodb_file_per_table, because the mysqld process couldn't work with that many open file descriptors efficiently. The only way to make the system work was to abandon file-per-table, and move all the tables into the central tablespace.
But that causes a different problem. Tablespaces never shrink, they only grow. The only way to shrink a tablespace is to move the tables to another tablespace, and drop the big one.
One day one of the developers added some code that used a table like a log, inserting a vast number of rows very rapidly. I got him to stop logging that data, but by then it was too late. MySQL's central tablespace had expanded to 95% of the size of the database storage, leaving too little space for binlogs and other files. And I could never shrink it without incurring downtime for our business.
I asked him, "Why were you writing to that table so much? What are you doing with the data you're storing?" He shrugged and said casually, "I dunno, I thought the data might be interesting sometime, but I had no specific use for them." I felt like strangling him.
The point of this story is that one naïve developer can cause a lot of inconvenience if you disable innodb_file_per_table.
When MySQL 8.0 was being planned, the MySQL Product Manager solicited ideas for scalability criteria. I told him about the need to support instances with a lot of tables, like 160k or more. MySQL 8.0 included an all-new implementation of internal code for handling metadata about tables, and he asked the engineers to test the scalability with up to 1 million tables (with file-per-table enabled).
So the best solution to your problem is not to turn off innodb_file_per_table. That will just lead to another kind of crisis. The best solution is to upgrade to 8.0.
Re your comment:
As far as I know, InnoDB does not open tables at startup time. It opens tables when they are first queried.
Make sure you have table_open_cache and innodb_open_files tuned for your scale. Here is some reading:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/table-cache.html
https://www.percona.com/blog/2009/11/18/how-innodb_open_files-affects-performance/
https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/11/28/what-happens-if-you-set-innodb_open_files-higher-than-open_files_limit/
https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/10/01/one-million-tables-mysql-8-0/
I hope you are using an SSD for storage, not a spinning disk. This makes a huge difference when doing a lot of small I/O operations. SSD storage devices have been a standard recommendation for database servers for about 10 years.
Also this probably doesn't help you but I gave up on using Windows around 2007. Not as a server nor a desktop.

Reduced performance in mysql after upgrade to 5.6.27

Our application was using MySql version 4.0.24 for a long time. We are trying to migrate it to version 5.6.27.
But, on testing the performance on 5.6.27, even the simple selects and updates are 30-40% slower when we are doing load testing. The CPU and IO speeds are much better than the older server. The storage engine of the tables is MyIsam in both versions. There's only one connection to the database. We tried the following options:
Changing storage engine to InnoDb - this reduce the performance drastically (70% slower)
Changing the innodb log size and buffer size - didn't help much
Increasing key buffer size with MyIsam storage engine for tables. - It made no difference
We tried modifying other parameters like query cache, tmp_table_size, heap_table_size. But, none of them made any difference.
Can you please let me know if there's any other option that we can try?
Here's a copy of my.cnf:
lower-case-table-names=1
myisam-recover=FORCE
key_buffer_size=2000M
Some things you can look at are whether the two servers have the same amount of RAM or not as it may be that the old server has more RAM and so can cache more things in memory.
You can also look at how are you connecting to the MySQL server - is it over a network? Is that network speed / quality different? Is one server accessed locally and the other over a network.
You tried tuning some good parameters, but in case there are ones you're missing, you can run mysql -e 'show variables' on both servers and then use a tool like Winmerge to compare the values of the two and see what might be different that you might not have thought of.
After trying multiple options, here are the configurations that worked for us. There may be other solutions as well but this worked for us.
Option 1:
Turned off the performance schema
Added a couple of jdbc connection parameters: useConfigs=maxPerformance&maintainTimeStats=false
Option 2:
Migrate to MariaDB. From a performance perspective, this worked out really well. It was giving a 5% better performance compared to mysql for our system. But, we couldn't pursue this option due to non-technical reasons.
Thank you for your inputs.

MySQL changing large table to InnoDB

I have a MySQL server running on CentOS which houses a large (>12GB) DB. I have been advised to move to InnoDB for performance reasons as we are experiencing lockups where the application that relies on the DB becomes unresponsive when the server is busy.
I have been reading around and can see that the ALTER command that changes the table to InnoDB is likely to take a long time and hammer the server in the process. As far as I can see, the only change required is to use the following command:
ALTER TABLE t ENGINE=InnoDB
I have run this on a test server and it seems to complete fine, taking about 26 minutes on the largest of the tables that needs to be converted.
Having never run this on a production system I am interested to know the following:
What changes are recommended to be made to the MySQL config to take advantage of additional performance of InnoDB tables? The server currently has 3GB assigned to InnoDB cache - was thinking of increasing this to 15GB once the additional RAM is installed.
Is there anything else I should do to the server with this change?
I would really recommend using either Percona MySQL or MariaDB. Both have tools that will help you get the most out of InnoDB, as well as some tools to help you diagnose and optimize your database further (for example, Percona's Online Schema Change tool could be used to alter your tables without downtime).
As far as optimization of InnoDB, I think most would agree that innodb_buffer_pool_size is one of the most important parameters to tune (and typically people set it around 70-80% of total available memory, but that's not a magic number). It's not the only important config variable, though, and there's really no magic run_really_fast setting. You should also pay attention to innodb_buffer_pool_instances (and there's a good discussion about this topic on https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/194/how-do-you-tune-mysql-for-a-heavy-innodb-workload)
Also, you should definitely check out the tips offered in the MySQL documentation itself (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/optimizing-innodb.html). It's also a good idea to pay attention to your InnoDB hit ratio (Rolado over at DBA Stackexchange has a great answer on this topic, eg, https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/65341/innodb-buffer-pool-hit-rate) and analyze your slow query logs carefully. Towards that later end, I would definitely recommend taking a look at Percona again. Their slow query analyzer is top notch and can really give you a leg up when it comes to optimizing SQL performance.

mysql windows 2003 defrag harddisk

We have a windows 2003 server with MySQL 5.1 installed. Since a few days the mysqldump is almost 1 hour slower than normal. The total size of the databases was growing with approx. 1 MB per day. Not much differences.
Our technical support guy can't find strange things on our machine. He says that it would be a good idea to defrag our server with MySQL on it. I never thought about defragmentation but I have Defraggler installed. After anaylizing it says 80% fragmentation!
Could that be the issue / reason why the dump's are getting slower with almost 1 hour ?
My first idea was that some windows update may be the reason.
Please sent me your thoughts
And is it wise to do a defragmentation on a MySQL production server??
Defraggler says deframentation could take more than 1 day ?
Your database dump is probably disk-bound, meaning that the is limited by accessing data on the disk.
If the data on the disk is highly fragmented, it can significantly affect the performance. Depending on the layout of the data on the disk, MySQL may be filling in lots of small gaps in the disk with the new data, which will be much slower to work with than large contiguous blocks of data.
Regular defragmentation is a good idea. However, since MySQL likely has a lock on the data files for your databases, it may be necessary to shut down MySQL to defragment its files.
I suggest at least running defraggler without shutting down MySQL to defragment as much as possible. I'm not familiar with defraggler, but if it makes it possible, try to find out if MySQL's data is fragmented. It might have a table of fragmented files or a graphical view of the data on the disk. The MySQL data files will probably be some of the largest files so that might make it easier to find them. If you find that its files are heavily fragmented, you may then want to try to find some time to shut down MySQL and defragment its files.

Locating unused indexes

What method(s) does one use to locate unused indexes on an extant MYSQL installation? Percona has tools, but these boxes are Amazon RDS instances so we don't have access to the nuts and bolts side for use of those tools.
I did locate http://hackmysql.com/mysqlidxchk and I think it may be my only option at this point. I can manually comb through and look for indexes with duplicate leading keys, but that also seems counter productive.
Are there other solutions that I am not seeing?
Yes, there is pt-index-usage, but you don't necessarily need to run it against your RDS instance.
You could collect query logs,* and then run pt-index-usage against a snapshot of your database running anywhere, even on your laptop. The tool just runs EXPLAIN for all queries in the log, and then reports any indexes that exist in the database but were not used by any EXPLAIN report.
RDS supports only table-based query logs, be careful of the overhead caused by this.
And you need to export the table-based query logs before using it as input to pt-index-usage. Here' a script that can do the export: https://github.com/billkarwin/bk-tools/blob/master/export-slow-log-table
MySQL 5.6 also has a new performance_schema table table_io_waits_summary_by_index_usage (see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/table-waits-summary-tables.html) and you can enable this to find out how frequently each index is loaded from disk into RAM, therefore it is being used. Though you may not be using MySQL 5.6, and I don't know if you can enable performance_schema options on RDS anyway.
My colleague at Percona just posted a blog that confirms you can enable the performance_schema on Amazon RDS, though not through the Web UI. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/21/amazon-rds-with-mysql-5-6-configuration-variables/
EXPLAIN along with your query is helpful, in this regard. Try it out, if it doesn't help, say so, with what you'd like to know that's missing as a comment and I'll look into it.