Switching to innoDB (mysql) - mysql

I'm running a classfieds website which has a records around 300K, it was on MyISAM engine but site at times will go high load and it will make server crashed. So my IT tech decided to switch to innoDB, since site is switched to innoDB it is very slow and taking alot of CPU 300%.
My IT tech said because changes are made recently he believes it is rebuilding indexes that's why site is slow and taking alot of cpu. Just want to know how true it is?

We can't tell without looking at the server, but it is possible. Other things that could be causing this is not enough memory assigned to InnoDB. People often forget to tweak default values in my.cnf file, which results in poor performance and a lot of disk I/O

Related

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.

Updated to InnoDb - MySQL Unstable

I have updated several MySQL tables to InnoDb. After doing so, MySQL has become sluggish and the hard drive I have the database on is constantly writing, even though my changes have been completed. Peridoically the CPU will get heavy use, 100% on two cores, but whatever is using them is not registering that us in System Monitor (Debian). Reading the database is possible, but slow. I have not tried writing, as it is obviously busy doing something - but I do not know what.
Digging deeper, I have found that I have a very large ibdata1 file, almost 62GB - I have some large tables in InnoDB, including 16, 10, 9, 1.5 and 1.1 GB; and many smaller.
Does anyone have any idea what may be happening here? Or logs I can look at that might shed some light? I have restarted, but when MySQL comes online, the same thing happens, and has been going on for over an hour. Also, would it be a good idea for me to change some InnoDB tables to MyISSAM? Of the large ones, none require InnoDb for transactions, but some of my smaller ones do (under 50MB).
Two most important options to start are innodb_buffer_size and innodb_logfile_size. Set former to be as big as your database, but leave at least 4-6G for the OS.
Optimal logfile size depends on how much you have writes, but something around 256M works for most workloads.

WordPress database performance: Percona server vs MySQL w/o InnoDB

I don't want to ask a subjective "which DBMS is best?" or "which DBMS of these two is better?". This doesn't have to be a fanboy debate.
Rather, I welcome any benchmark test results or specific experiences, when it comes to one specific criteria - performance - especially with respect to one particular application: WordPress.
I understand that WordPress doesn't use InnoDB, and so disabling InnoDB in MySQL can speed things up. On the other hand, Percona is a MySQL fork that replaces InnoDB with XtraDB and also claims to be highly efficient, high-performance.
How does each stack up on performance when it comes to running WordPress? (no need for competition...both might come out looking very well, for all I know)
I have tried searching generally on Google, but haven't come across so much as an intelligent discussion, let alone performance benchmark tests.
Would greatly appreciate if any of the experts here could share their experiences. Many thanks!
And please keep any smug, snide comments like "why don't YOU try" to yourself. If I could, I would. And the purpose of Stack Overflow is to share expertise and learn from each-other, not to do everything yourself.
This question is less "MySQL vs. Percona Server" than "MyISAM vs. InnoDB/XtraDB". They both have their own performance characteristics and which storage engine is right for you largely depends on your workload. Most Wordpress sites are low traffic and read-mostly, so as long as your data fits into your buffer pool (for InnoDB/XtraDB) or key cache (for MyISAM), I would expect not-too-dissimilar performance.
Having done a lot of work on Wordpress database optimization, I can tell you that the performance of your Wordpress site depends more upon the class of your hardware and your chosen plugins.
You should use a Caching plugin so that you can just avoid a ton of database read requests
You should avoid plugins that issue expensive queries (sadly, this covers most plugins)
You should prune your comments (usually comments are 99+% SPAM so the ones that are marked as spam are just sitting in your database taking up space)
Your host should have enough RAM for the hot dataset to fit in memory
If you really want to go into detail about MyISAM vs. InnoDB/XtraDB, you can check out the following links:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/01/12/should-you-move-from-myisam-to-innodb/
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/mysql-engines-myisam-vs-innodb
So, to make a long answer even longer, you'll need to profile your MySQL instance after you can generate production traffic. I know you said you couldn't, but ... this question is kind of like me asking "What haircut would look best on me", without including a picture.
Wordpress can use InnoDB (or XtraDB) just fine. I have done consulting and training for sites that host WordPress at scale, using any of MyISAM, InnoDB, and XtraDB.
WordPress 3.5.1 creates tables without specifying the storage engine. So it honors the default storage engine on whatever instance of MySQL you're using. As of MySQL 5.5 (ca. December 2010), the default storage engine is InnoDB. I tested installing WordPress on a virtual host running MySQL 5.6.10, and it created tables using the InnoDB storage engine.
I don't have any benchmarks to share, but those would be of limited use anyway, because performance depends so much on the given hardware, the traffic load, and other factors.
A CMS like WordPress tends to be heavily weighted toward read-only queries. This is where InnoDB should give good benefit, because it caches data pages as well as indexes. MyISAM only caches indexes, and relies on the filesystem cache to hold data.
So the key to making WordPress perform well is to allocate enough innodb_buffer_pool_size to hold the data and indexes for all your tables. The data size of a WordPress site (even one with hundreds of articles) isn't typically very large, so you probably only need a few GB of buffer pool to hold all frequently-requested data in the buffer. Once the data and index pages have populated the InnoDB buffer pool, 99.9% of your queries will be served out of RAM, and the site will have great performance.
As with any caching system, the real killer to performance is when your "hot" data is larger than the cache, forcing queries to incur disk I/O. A single disk I/O is worth a few thousand RAM accesses, so you want to serve content completely out of RAM as much as possible.
The improvements in XtraDB are designed to help as the number of Threads_running gets higher, or the buffer pool gets larger (e.g. dozens of GB). It's unlikely that a single WP site will exercise either MySQL or Percona Server so heavily that these improvements will offer more than a slight advantage. Unless you're going to host hundreds of WP sites on a given server like a hosting company.
You may even find that the bottleneck ceases to be the database, and then you need to focus on front-end optimizations.

At what point does MySQL INNODB fine tuning become a requirement?

I had a look at this:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/01/12/should-you-move-from-myisam-to-innodb/
and:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/11/01/innodb-performance-optimization-basics/
These answer a lot of my questions regarding INNODB vs MyISAM. There is no doubt in my mind that INNODB is the way I should go. However, I am working on my own and for development I have created a LAMP (ubuntu 10.10 x64) VM server. At present the server has 2 GB memory and a single SATA 20GB drive. I can increase both of these amounts without too much trouble to about 3-3.5 GB memory and a 200GB drive.
The reasons I hesitate to switch over to INNODB is:
A) The above articles mention that INNODB will vastly increase the size of the tables, and he recommends much larger amounts of RAM and drive space. While in a production environment I don't mind this increase, in a development environment, I fear I can not accommodate.
B) I don't really see any point in fine tuning the INNODB engine on my VM. This is likely something I will not even be allowed to do in my production environment. The articles make it sound like INNODB is doomed to fail without fine tuning.
My question is this. At what point is INNODB viable? How much RAM would I need to run INNODB on my server (with just my data for testing. This server is not open to anyone but me)? and also is it safe for me to assume that a production environment that will not allow me to fine tune the DB has likely already fine tuned it themselves?
Also, am I overthinking/overworrying about things?
IMHO, it becomes a requirement when you have tens of thousands of rows, or when you can forecast the rate of growth for data.
You need to focus on tuning the innodb buffer pool and the log file size. Also, make sure you have innodb_file_per_table enabled.
To get an idea of how big to make the innodb buffer pool in KB, run this query:
SELECT SUM(data_length+index_length)/power(1024,1) IBPSize_KB
FROM information_schema.tables WHERE engine='InnoDB';
Here it is in MB
SELECT SUM(data_length+index_length)/power(1024,2) IBPSize_MB
FROM information_schema.tables WHERE engine='InnoDB';
Here it is in GB
SELECT SUM(data_length+index_length)/power(1024,3) IBPSize_GB
FROM information_schema.tables WHERE engine='InnoDB';
I wrote articles about this kind of tuning
First Article
Second Article
Third Article
Fourth Article
IF you are limited by the amount of RAM on your server, do not surpass more than 25% of the installed for the sake of the OS.
I think you may be over thinking things. Its true that INNODB loves ram but if your database is small I don't think you'll have many problems. The only issue I have had with MYSQL or any other database is that as the data grows so do the requirements for accessing it quickly. You can also use compression on the tables to keep them smaller but INNODB is vastly better than MYISAM at data integrity.
I also wouldn't worry about tuning your application until you run into a bottleneck. Writing efficient queries and database design seems to be more important than memory unless you're working with very large data sets.

Using a MySQL database is slow

We have a dedicated MySQL server, with about 2000 small databases on it. (It's a Drupal multi-site install - each database is one site).
When you load each site for the first time in a while, it can take up to 30s to return the first page. After that, the pages return at an acceptable speed. I've traced this through the stack to MySQL. Also, when you connect with the command line mysql client, connection is fast, then "use dbname" is slow, and then queries are fast.
My hunch is that this is due to the server not being configured correctly, and the unused dbs falling out of a cache, or something like that, but I'm not sure which cache or setting applies in this case.
One thing I have tried is the innodb_buffer_pool size. This was set to the default 8M. I tried raising it to 512MB (The machine has ~ 2GB of RAM, and the additional RAM was available) as the reading I did indicated that more should give better performance, but this made the system run slower, so it's back at 8MB now.
Thanks for reading.
With 2000 databases you should adjust the table cache setting. You certainly have a lot of cache miss in this cache.
Try using mysqltunner and/or tunning_primer.sh to get other informations on potential issues with your settings.
Now drupal makes Database intensive work, check you Drupal installations, you are maybe generating a lot (too much) of requests.
About the innodb_buffer_pool_size, you certainly have a lot of pagination cache miss with a little buffer (8Mb). The ideal size is when all your data and indexes size can fit in this buffer, and with 2000 databases... well it is quite certainly a very little size but it will be hard for you to grow. Tunning a MySQL server is hard, if MySQL takes too much RAM your apache won't get enough RAM.
Solutions are:
check that you do not make the connexion with DNS names but with IP
(in case of)
buy more RAM
set MySQL on a separate server
adjust your settings
For Drupal, try to set the session not in the database but in memcache (you'll need RAM for that but it will be better for MySQL), modules for that are available. If you have Drupal 7 you can even try to set some of the cache tables in memcache instead of MySQL (do not do that with big cache tables).
edit: last thing, I hope you have not modified Drupal to use persistent database connexions, some modules allows that (or having an old drupal 5 which try to do it automatically). With 2000 database you would kill your server. Try to check mysql error log for "too many connections" errors.
Hello Rupertj as I read you are using tables type innodb, right?
innodb table is a bit slower than myisam tables, but I don't think it is a major problem, as you told, you are using drupal system, is that a kind of mult-sites, like a word-press system?
If yes, sorry about but this kind of systems, each time you install a plugin or something else, it grow your database in tables and of course in datas.. and it can change into something very very much slow. I have experiencied by myself not using Drupal but using Word-press blog system, and it was a nightmare to me and my friends..
Since then, I have abandoned the project... and my only advice to you is, don't install a lot of plugins in your drupal system.
I hope this advice help you, because it help me a lot in word-press.
This sounds like a caching issue in Drupal, not MYSQL. It seems there are a few very heavy queries, or many, many small ones, or both, that hammer the database-server. Once that is done, Drupal caches that in several caching layers. After which only one (or very few) queries are all that is needed to build up a page. Slow in the beginning, fast after that.
You will have to profile it to determine what the cause is, but the table cache seems like a likely suspect.
However, you should also be mindful of persistent connections - which should absolutely definitely, always be turned off (yes, for everyone, not just you). Apache / PHP persistent connections are a pessimisation that you and everyone else can generally do without.