I'm working on a chat server which uses a MySQL database for user login and authentication (messages are kept in memory and only saved to or loaded from the database on shutdown and startup, respectively). Each chatroom is implemented as a separate process so that, if one chatroom goes down, the entire server is not dead. When the user connects, and each time he posts a message, the room server process reads his authentication info from the database. Re-authenticating on each message is required to prevent multiple sessions by the same user. Presuming that messages are posted at a reasonable rate (1 message per user every ~5-10 seconds), is it more efficient for the room server to maintain a persistent MySQL connection over the entire lifetime of the server, or for the server to connect, make its request, and disconnect? Does the answer change if it is possible that the room is idle (no messages) for a few days at a time? And lastly, does the answer change if the MySQL server is running on the same hardware vs. on a different machine on the network?
Establishing a connection can be an expensive thing - from a network perspective as well as the authentication against the database. I've moved sites from single connections being opened/closed to connection pools and seen a huge performance boost (>= 20%, if I recall).
Definitely the way to go.
Related
I have an RDS instance hosting a mySQL database. Instance size is db.t2.micro
I also have an ExpressJS backend connecting to the mySQL RDS instance via a connection pool:
Additionally i have a mobile app, the client, feeding off the ExpressJS API.
The issue i'm facing is, either via the mobile app or via Postman, there are times where i get a 'Too many connections' error and therefore several requests fail:
On the RDS instance. On current activity i sometimes get 65 connections, showing it's reaching the limit. What i need clarity on is:
When 200 mobile app instances connect to the API, to the RDS instance, does it register as 200 connections or 1 connection from ExpressJS?
Is it normal to be reaching the RDS instance 65 connection limit?
Is this just a matter of me using db.t2.micro instance size which is not recommended for prod? Will upgrading the instance size resolve this issue?
Is there something i'm doing wrong with my requests?
Thank you and your feedback is appreciated.
If your app creates a connection pool of 100, that's the number of database connections it will try to open. It must be lower than your MySQL connection limit.
Typically connection pools open all the connections for the pool, so they are ready when a client calls the http API. The connections might normally be running no SQL queries, if there are not many clients using the API at a given moment. The database connections are nevertheless connected.
Sort of like when you ssh to a remote linux server but you just sit there at a shell prompt for a while before running any command. You're still connected.
You asked if a db.t2.micro instance was not recommended for production. Yes, I would agree with that. It's tempting to use the smallest instance possible to save money, but a db.t2.micro is too small for anything but light testing, in my opinion.
In fact, I would not use any t2 instance for production, regardless of size. The t2 type uses "burstable" performance. This means it can provide only brief periods of good performance. Once the instance depletes its performance credits, they recharge slowly, and while they recharge, the performance of that instance is very low. This is okay for testing, but not for production, if you expect to provide consistent performance at any time.
Creating a Web application with not much concurrent connections (probably less then 100), each customer will have its own Websocket connected to the nodeJS server without any specific pooling interface. My question is related to the server connecting to MySQL. Right now, it opens/closes a MySQL connection for every client request (no more than one every few seconds). My question is: even in this low load context, is it anyway better to keep the MySQL connection opened while the Websocket is opened, or should I continue to create a fresh MySQL connection for each client request?
Thank you very much in advance.
i have a database that thousands of users need to connect to (via ODBC) for very brief periods (it's a subscription licensing database for a win32 desktop app). They connect, get their approval to run and disconnect).
max_connections is set to 1000 but am not seeing the re-use i would expect server side. i.e. server currently has about 800 processes/connections sleeping (and another 200 connected to real data in other databases on the same server) .... yet a new attempt by a client app was rejected 'too many connections'.
What am i missing?
have increased the max_connections for now to 1500 but if that just means another 500 sleeping connections it's not a long term solution. pretty sure clients are disconnecting properly but am adding some diagnostics to the win32 app just in case.
MariaDB 10.3.11
with MySQL ODBC 5.3 ANSI Driver
It's normal to see a lot of sessions "Sleeping". That means the client is connected, but not executing a query at this moment. The client is likely doing other tasks, before or after running an SQL query. Just like if you are logged into a server with ssh, most of the time you're just sitting at the shell prompt not running any program.
It's up to you to design your clients to wait to connect until they need data, then disconnect promptly after getting their data. It's pretty common in apps that they connect to the database at startup, and remain connected. It's also pretty common in some frameworks to make multiple connections at startup, and treat them as a pool that can be used by multiple threads of the client app. It's your app, so you should configure this as needed.
Another thing to try is to enable the thread pool in the MariaDB server. See https://mariadb.com/kb/en/thread-pool-in-mariadb/
This is different from a client-side connection pool. The thread pool allows many thousands of clients to think they're connected, without allocating a full-blown thread in the MariaDB server for every single connection. When a client has something to query, at that time it is given one of the threads. When that client is done, it may continue to maintain a connection, but the thread in the MariaDB server is reallocated to a different client's request.
This is good for "bursty" workloads by many clients, and it sounds like your case might be a good candidate.
I know it is very basic. But want to clear some concept of mysql connections. I have following scenario.
Db server and web servers are on different locations.
Web server is running an article based web site.
Articles data is stored in db server.
Web server is delivering 100 articles/pages per second.
My questions are as follows:
Single connection between web server and db server can handle it ?
How many connections would be created by default ?
If I suppose connections as pipes, what is i/o capacity of each connection ?
Is there any relationship between db server's RAM, processor, OS and number of connections ?
Thanks in advance
Single connection between web server and db server can handle it?
A single connection can pass several requests, but not at the same time, and only for a single client process. So the best scaling approach might be one connection pool per web server process, where threads can obtain an established connection to perform their request, and return the connection to the pool once they are done.
How many connections would be created by default ?
Depends on the client language, the MySQL connector implementation, the frameworks you use, the web server configuration, and probably a bunch of other details like this. So your best bet is to simply look at the list of network connections to the MySQL service, e.g. using lsof or netstat.
If I suppose connections as pipes, what is i/o capacity of each connection ?
The limiting factor will probably be shared resources, like the network bandwidth or processing capabilities at either end. So the number of connections shouldn't have a large impact on the data transfer rate. The overhead to establish a connection is significant, though, which is why I suggested reducing the number of connections using pooling.
Is there any relationship between db server's RAM, processor, OS and number of connections ?
Might be, if some application makes choices based on these parameters, but in general I'd consider this rather unlikely.
One of the ERP applications I worked with was configured in such a way that there was only 1 user (for example USER A) who connected to the database. Any user of the application (workforce was in the thousands) who logged on to the system and tried to do anything was in effect calling USER A to connect to the database and execute queries for him. The database was Oracle.
I was wondering how to achieve a similar thing with mySQL. I have a web application built with php and mySQL database. I expect different people to query the database via the web. Currently when a user opens up the web page, a connection to the database is made via a single db user. At the end of the query, I close the connection. However the database has a maximum user connection of 10 which in my understanding means one user can only establish a max of 10 connections. I do not want to have to create several users for all the people who try to use my application (I do not even know the number of people who will use the application and I do not believe this will be a scalable solution)
You should look for a db connection caching mechanism as a component for either your web server or your programming language. Such a mechanism will reuse connections transparently for you.
If the database connection is refused return HTTP error 502. If connections are closed at the end of each pageload they should only last ~100ms, so concurrent connections will be low for most situations.
Should you need to adjust it, edit my.cnf to increase concurrent connections:
max_connections = 150
max_user_connections = 150
If traffic is very high you can enable persistent MySQL connections in PHP, or cache your content so not to hammer the database.
Hope that helps!