How to avoid DB requery on pagination using ASP Classic and MySQL? - mysql

I have a page that querying products from the database and displaying then in pages of 30 items. When I navigate to the next page, the application re-queries the DB and displays page no. 2 and so on.
How can I avoid this database re-query? Can I store the results somewhere? We are talking about 1500-2000 rows/query and when we have 400-450 users online, our dedicated server runs at 100% CPU capacity.

Do you have enough memory to pre-load your entire "catalog" (in Application level storage) and then have SQL return all results, but store only the index (in each Session).
Something like this:
On Application Start: create my read only Application-level cache
On Search: SQL returns all results (I assume you have to do SQL, so you can check business conditions
On results: build list of indices that map into Application cache
On Display Page: Read and display apropriate range from Application cache
If you don't have enough memory, then a "Result" table might provide some optimization: on a per-session basis, cache entire query result into a "flattened" table, to avoid potentially expensive (busines-logic-heavy) products query. You have to be careful to detect when the query changes, so you can discard cache, and also have some server-side logic to cleanup old, expired searches.

As I stated the main reason I was asking for a solution was to avoid CPU overload. It seemed unnatural for the server to be clogged up at 100% with only 500-600 users online. I discovered the optimize table MySQL command, which works on MyISAM tables and it totally solved the problem. Immediately after executing the command, the CPU usage went down to 10-12%.
So, if there is anyone else out there running MySQL applications that overload the CPU, you should first try the Optimize Table command and other maintenance tasks described here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/optimize-table.html

Related

Database Query executes slower on production vs. test, on same server, same DB structure

I have a web page that is loading using a DB SELECT query that the page is making, to a view table that joins several core tables.
The load time was fast enough (according to tools like Google Page Speed and PingDom), but recently, for a reason I can't figure, it suddenly became slower.
However, if I change the same page to load the query from the DB of the test user, and not the production user (who are both on the same server and IP), it will load fast as it used to. So I can eliminate the possibility that another process on the server is causing the slow down, as otherwise it would effect test user as well.
As far as I can see, I have a similar DB structure (same Primary and Secondary Keys, and the tables are using the same engines, usually INNODB), so I think I can also eliminate the cause a non-optimized DB structure.
Only other difference is that on production I have 500 items, and on test 400 items, but I doubt this is significant, as any way my DB query should only load data from one item at a time.
What else could I check for? Is there a good tool to compare between the structures to be sure it's identical?
I'm running on Centos 7.5 according to WHM panel.

Using Redis to cache SQL result

I have a SQL-based application and I like to cache the result using Redis. You can think of the application as an address book with multiple SQL tables. The application performs the following tasks:
40% of the time:
Create a new record / Update an existing record
Bulk update multiple records
Review an existing record
60% of the time:
Search records based on user's criteria
This is my current approach:
The system cache a record when a record is created or updated.
When user performs a search, the system will cache the query result.
On top of that, I have a Redis look-up table (Redis Set) which stores the MySQL record ID and the Redis cache key. That way I can delete the Redis caches if the MySQL record has been changed (e.g., bulk update).
What if a new record is created after the system cache the search result? If the new record matches the search criteria, the system will always return the old cache (which does not include the new record), until the cache is deleted (which won't happen until an existing record in the cache is updated).
The search is driven by the users and the combination of the search condition is countless. It is not possible to evaluate which cache should be deleted when a new record is created.
So far, the only solution is to remove all caches of a MySQL table when a record is created. However this is not a good choice because lots of records are created daily.
In this situation, what's the best way to implement Redis on top of MySQL?
Here's a surprising thing when it comes to PHP and MySQL (I am not sure about other languages) - not caching stuff into memcached or Redis is actually faster. Much faster. Basically, if you just built your app and queried MySQL - you'd get more out of it.
Now for the "why" part.
InnoDB, the default engine, is a superb engine. Specifically, it's memory management (allocation and what not) is superior to any memory storage solutions. That's a fact, you can look it up or take my word for it - it will, at least, perform as good as Redis.
Now what happens in your app - you query MySQL and cache the result into redis. However, MySQL is also smart enough to keep cached results. What you just did is create an additional file descriptor that's required to connect to Redis. You also used some storage (RAM) to cache the result that MySQL already cached.
Here comes another interesting part - the preferred way of serving PHP scripts is by using php-fpm - it's much quicker than any mod_* crap out there. Down to the core, php-fpm is a supervisor process that spawns child processes. They don't shut down after the script is served, which means they cache connections to MySQL - connect once, use multiple times. Basically, if you serve scripts using php-fpm, they will reuse the already established connection to MySQL, meaning that you won't be opening and closing connections for each request - this is extremely resource friendly and it lets you have lightning fast connection to MySQL. MySQL, being memory efficient and having the cached result is much quicker than Redis.
Now what does all of this mean for you - having a proper setup lets you have small code that's simple, easy, doesn't involve Redis and eliminates all the problems that you might have with cache invalidation and what not and you won't waste your memory to contain the same data twice.
Ingredients you need for this to work:
php-fpm
MySQL and InnoDB based tables and most of all - sufficient RAM and tweaked innodb_buffer_pool_size variable. That one controls how much RAM InnoDB is allowed to allocate for its purposes - the larger the better.
You eliminated Redis from the game, you kept your code simple and easy to maintain, you didn't duplicate data, you didn't introduce additional system to the play and you let software that's meant to take care of data do its job. Pretty cheap trade-off for maximum usefulness, even if you compile all the software from scratch - it won't take more than an hour or so to get it up and running.
Or, you can just ignore what I wrote and look for a solution using Redis.
We met the same problem and we chose to do same thing you are thinking of: remove all query caches affected by the table. It is not ideal like your said but fortunately our "write" is not as high as 40% so it's ok so far.
That's the nature of query based caching. As an alternative you can add entity based caching. Instead of caching the search result only, cache the entire table and do the search inside memory. We use C# LINQ so we can do pretty common queries in memory but if the search is too complicated then you are out of luck.

How to cache popular queries to avoid both stamedes and blank results

On the customizable front page of our web site, we offer users the option of showing modules showing recently updated content, choosing from well over 100 modules.
All of the data is generated by MySQL queries, the results of which are cached via memcached. Our current system works like this: when a user load a page containing modules, module, they are immediately served the data from cache, and the query is added to a queue to be updated by a separate gearman process (so that the page load does not wait for the mysql query). That query is then run once every 15 minutes to refresh the data in cache. The queue of queries itself is periodically purged so that we do not continually refresh data that has not been requested recently.
The problem is what to do when the cache is empty, for some reason. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, the user is currently shown an empty module, and the data is refreshed in the gearman process so that a bit later, when the same (or a different) user reloads the page, there is data to show.
Our traffic is such that, if we were to try to run the query live for the user when the cache is empty, we would have a serious problem with stampeding--we'd be running the same (possibly slow) query many times as many users loaded the page. Is there any way to solve the "blank module" problem without opening up the risk of stampeding?
This is an interesting implementation though varies a bit from the way most typically implement memcached in fronT of MySQL.
In most cases users will set things up to where queries are first evaluated at memcached to see if there is is an available entry. If so they server it from memcached and never query the database at all. If there is a cache miss, then the query is made against the database, the results added to memcached, and the information returned to the caller. This is how you would typically build up your cache for read queries.
In cases where data is being updated, the update would be made against the database, and then the appropriate data in memcached invalidated and/or updated. Similarly for inserts, you could either do nothing regarding the cache (and let the next read on that record populate the cache), or you could actively add the data related to the insert into the cache, depending on your application needs.
In this way you wouldn't need to take the extra step of calling the database to get authoritative data after getting initial data from memcached. The data in memcached would be a copy of the authoritative data which is just updated/invalidated upon updates/inserts.
Based on your comments, one thing you might want to try in order to prevent a number of of queries on your database in case of cache misses is to use a mutex of sorts. For example, when the first client hits memcached and gets a cache miss for that lookup, you could could insert a temporary value in memcached indicating that the data is pending, then make the query against the database, and the update the memcached data with the result.
On the client side, when you get a cache miss or a "pending" result, you could simply initiate a retry for the cache after a certain period of time (which you may want to increase exponentially). So perhaps first hey wait for 1 second, then try back gain in 2 seconds if they still get a "pending" results, then retry in 4 seconds, and so on.
This would amount in possibly more requests against the memcached server, but should resolve any problems on the database layer.

MySQL and Hibernate Simultaneous read write

I have a web application which has the following parts:
Commentators continuously doing match commentary through a browser based tool. The comments are inserted into DB using hibernat.
Lots of users are accessing a URL to read commentary. Hibernate is reading data from the table being updated by commentators in step #1.
There are some stored procedures as well which are set to run every 1 hour. Few of them access the same table (used in step #1 and #2) for reading and writing/updating purpose.
Now my problem is, whenever the site has 100+ concurrent users watching a particular match commentary, my MySQL goes down. It shows lots of queries stuck in processlist. Many of them are in "Copying to temp table" state. This makes the JBOSS restart frequently.
I am using transactions in hibernate for both reading and writing purposes. Please help because I loose big matches because of these crashes.
You have a performance problem. It is difficult to give solutions which always work. What you can consider to do is:
1) Revise the HQL (Hibernate) statements. For this best you write a protocol with <property name="show_sql">true</property> in the config file (or even a tool like log4jdbc if you want to see the actual parameters) and analyse the output. There you see which SQL requests you have most. In many cases a better strategy for reading and writing db data can significantly reduce the database traffic. And check you have good indexes for your table.
2) Consider to use a second level cache. (Normally hibernate only uses the first level cache, which is of no use in your case because it is bound to one session.) Then at least the requests for reading actual commentaries can be served by the cache and don't need to go to the database. (Pay attention: The cache might interfere with the stored procedures. Have a look if the cache product you like to use supports MySQL stored procedures. In the worst case you have to remove the stored procedures for the critical tables and let you application server do the job so it goes through the cache.)
3) If it is only a few tables which are heavily used you can consider to cache them by your application. That's more work, but perhaps you can do it exactly for the demands of your application, so you might be faster than with a general second level cache.
4) If nothing helps and the traffic is really too heavy then perhaps you have to invest in more hardware.
Good luck ;-)

Reduce database writes with memached

I would like to convert my stats tracking system not to write to the database directly, as we're hitting bottlenecks.
We're currently using memcached for certain aspects of the site, and I wanted to use it for storing stats and committing them to mysql DB periodically.
The issue lies however in the number of items (which is in the millions) for which potentially there could be stats collected between the cronjob runs that would commit them into the database. Other than running a SELECT * FROM data and checking for existence of every single memcache key, and then updating the table.... is there any other way to do this?
(I'm not saying below is gospel, this is just my gut feeling. As said later on, I don't have the specifics of your system :) And obviously no offence meant etc :) )
I would advice against using memcached for this. Memcached is build te quickly retrieve values that you've gotten before, not to store values. The big difference is that is your cache is getting full, you'll loose your data.
Normally, you'd just have no data in your cache, and recollect the data from the source, which is impossible in this case. That alone would be a reason for me to try an dissuade you from this.
Now you say the major problem is the mysql connection limit you are hitting. If you do simple stuff (like what we talked about in the comments: the insert delayed), it's just a case of increasing the limit. You should probably have enough power to have your scripts/users go to the database once and say "this should eventually be added", and then go away. If your users can't even open 1 connection for that, there's a serious resource problem you probably won't fix by adding extra layers of cache?
Obviously hard to say without any specs of the system, soft and hardware, but my suggestion would be to see if you can just let them open their connections by increasing the limit, and fiddle with the server variables a bit, instead of monkey-patching your system by using a memcached as an in-between layer.
I had a similar issue with statistic data. But please don't use memcached for it. You can't be sure that ALL your items will moved to DB. You can loose data and/or double process data.
You should analyse your bottleneck against how much data you are writing/reading and how many connections you need. And than switch to something scalable like Hadoop, Cassandra, Scripe and other systems.
You need to provide additional information on the platform that you are running: O/S, database (version), storage engine, RAM, CPU (if possible)?
Are you inserting into a single table or more than one table?
Can you disable the indexes on the tables you are inserting into as this slows down the insert functions.
Are you running any triggers or stored procedures to compute values as you insert the raw data?