DB response is too slow - mysql

What can be done to identify the reason for DB slowness?
When i ran the query in the morning it ran quickly & i got the output.
When i run the same query after 1 hr, it took more than 2mins.
What can be checked to identify this slowness?
All the tables are properly indexed.

If it's just a single query which is running slowly, EXPLAIN SELECT... as mentioned by arex1337 may help you see the reason.
It would also be worth looking at the output of e.g. vmstat on the box whilst running the query to see what it's doing - you should be able to get a feel for whether the machine is swapping, IO-bound, CPU-bound etc.
Check also with top to look for any rogue processes hogging CPU time.
Finally, if the machine is using RAID, it's possible that, if a drive has failed, the RAID array could be in a degraded state, which could make disc access slower (this is only applicable in certain RAID configurations, but worth considering and ruling out).

You can use EXPLAIN <your query> to get information about how MySQL executes your query. Maybe you get some hints about why it's slow.
EXPLAIN SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ...;
Also, maybe you just have a slow query, and it was fast the second time because the result was cached?

Related

Where should I focus: Optimize the query, changing database config or what else?

I took over a project and have 2 MyISAM tables.
table1 with approx. 1M rows, and
table2 with approx. 100K rows.
In the project these tables are accessed often, and at first it seems ok.
After I installed the project on a Windows 8.1 for local development I found that every day, the first time I access the site, my query takes 14 seconds. A bit too much.
Afterwards is less than 0.1 second.
Now, since on dev this accumulated with another query runs into a timeout-exception for php, it got me concerned about whether it's recommended to do anything about it or not. On production it seems not to occur (or hard to reproduce).
I heard of things like warm cache or optimize query but don't know what is meant by that.
What do experts like you do in this case?
I had another question set up here trying to see whether I can optimize the query.
Changing to InnoDB doesn't seem to have an impact.
The "first" time you run a query, two things may or may not happen:
Lots of disk I/O may be done to fetch the index blocks and/or data blocks from disk. (If other queries happened to have fetched those blocks, the blocks may be cached already.) (14s vs 0.1s is more than I usually see for this cold/warm cache difference.)
If the "Query cache" was on, the first SELECT and its resultset were stored in the QC. The second call may have found it there and returned the result almost instantly. (Usually this is ~1ms, not the 100ms you mentioned.) The QC can be bypassed for a single query by saying SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE ....
Since it is annoying you daily, you may as well go through the exercise of trying to optimize the query. If the tables are growing daily, it may get slower and slower over time. Note that if production needs to be restarted for any reason, that query may timeout on it. So, yes, try to optimize it.
A million rows is beginning to be "big".
The characteristics of this indicate that you are I/O-bound only initially. So it does not indicate that key_buffer_size and innodb_buffer_pool_size are too low.
If you want to discuss the performance of a particular query, start a new thread and provide SHOW CREATE TABLE and EXPLAIN SELECT ....

Mysql query fast only first time run

I have a mysql SELECT query which is fast (<0.1 sec) but only the first time I run it. It joins 3 tables together (using indices) and has a relatively simple WHERE statement. When I run it by hand in the phpmyadmin (always changing numbers in the WHERE so that it isn't cached) it is always fast but when I have php run several copies of it in a row, the first one is fast and the others hang for ~400 sec. My only guess is that somehow mysql is running out of memory for the connection and then has to do expensive paging.
My general question is how can I fix this behavior, but my specific questions are without actually closing and restarting the connection how can I make these queries coming from php be seen as separate just like the queries coming from phpmyadmin, how can I tell mysql to flush any memory when the request is done, and does this sound like a memory issue to you?
Well I found the answer at least in my case and I'm putting it here for anyone in the future who runs into a similar issue. The query I was running had a lot of results returned and MYSQL's query cache was causing a lot of overhead. When you run a query MYSQL will save it and its output so that it can quickly answer future identical requests quickly. All I had to do was put SQL_NO_CACHE and the speed was back to normal. Just look out if your incoming query is large or the results are very large because it can take considerable resources for MYSQL to decide when to kick things out.

Extreme low-priority SELECT query in MySQL

Is it possible to issue an (expensive, but low-priority) SELECT query to mySQL in such a way that if an UPDATE query appears in the queue, mySQL will immediately terminate the query, and re-append it to the end of the queue?
If re-appending to the queue is not possible, I'm happy with simply killing the SELECT query.
No, not really.
I am not sure exactly what you need, but my guess is that you need to either optimize the SELECT to not lock an entire table, or get the replication going and do the SELECT on the slave rather than the master.
You could theoretically find out what the MySQL process ID is of the SELECT query, and in your application send a KILL before you do any update.
Well, sort of maybe.
A client runs an application which occasionally throws out queries that completely kill performance for everything else on the server. We have monitoring and if we've got a suitable person ready to react, we can deal to that query manually, and we learn about the problems in the app by doing things that way.
But to prevent major outages if noone is on the ball, we have an automated script which terminates long running queries, so the server does recover in the event that noone is available to intervene within 15 minutes.
Far from ideal, but that's where things are currently at with this project, and it does prevent the occasional extended outages that used to occur. We can only move just so fast with fixing up the problem queries.
Anyway, you could run something similar, that looks at the running queries and recognises when you have an update waiting on one of your large selects, and in that event it kills the select. Doing this sort of check a few times a minute is not overly expensive. I'd want to do a bit of testing before running.
So, whether you can solve your problem this way depends on what your tolerance is for how long an update can be delayed. Running this every minute (as we do) is no problem at all. Running it every second would noticeably add to the overall load. You'd need to test how far you can reasonably go in between those points.
This approach means some delay before the select gets pushed out of the way, but it saves you having to build this logic into potentially many different places in your application.
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Regarding breaking up your query, you're most likely better off restricting the chunks by id range from one or more tables in your query rather than by offset and limit.
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There may also be good solutions available based on partitioning your tables so that the queries don't collide as badly. Make sure you have a very good grasp on what you are doing for this though.

How to tell if a MySQL process is stuck?

I have a long-running process in MySQL. It has been running for a week. There is one other connection, to a replication master, but I have halted slave processing so there's effectively nothing else going on.
How can I tell if this process is still working? I knew it would take a long time which is why I put it on its own database instance, but this is longer than I anticipated. Obviously, if it is still doing work, I don't want to kill it. If it is zombied, then I don't know how to get the work done that it's supposed to be doing.
It's in the "Sending data" state. The table is an InnoDB one but without any FK references that are used by the query. The InnoDB status shows no errors or locks since the query started.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Try "SHOW PROCESSLIST" to see what's active.
Of course if you kill it, it may then want to take just as much time rolling it back.
You need to kill it and come up with better indices.
I did a job for a guy. Had a table with about 35 million rows. His batch process, like yours, had been running a week, with no end in sight. I added some indexes, made some changes to the order and methods of his batch process, and got the whole thing down to about two and a half hours. On a slower machine.
Given what you've said, it's not stuck. However, the is absolutely no guarantee that it will actually finish in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time. Adding indicies will almost certainly help, and depending on the type of query refactoring it into a series of queries that use temp tables could possibly give you a huge performance boost. I wouldn't suggest waiting around for it to maybe finish.
For better performance on a database that size, you may want to look at a document based database such as mongoDB. It will take more hard drive space to store the database, but depending on your current schema, you may get much better performance.

MySQL slow query log - how slow is slow?

What do you find is the optimal setting for mysql slow query log parameter, and why?
I recommend these three lines
log_slow_queries
set-variable = long_query_time=1
log-queries-not-using-indexes
The first and second will log any query over a second. As others have pointed out a one second query is pretty far gone if you are a shooting for a high transaction rate on your website, but I find that it turns up some real WTFs; queries that should be fast, but for whatever combination of data it was run against was not.
The last will log any query that does not use an index. Unless your doing data warehousing any common query should have the best index you can find so pay attention to its output.
Although its certainly not for production, this last option
log = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log
will log all queries, which can be useful if you are trying to tune a specific page or action.
Whatever time /you/ feel is unacceptably slow for a query on your systems.
It depends on the kind of queries you run and the kind of system; a query taking several seconds might not matter if it's some back-end reporting system doing complex data-mining etc where a delay doesn't matter, but might be completely unacceptable on a user-facing system which is expected to return results promptly.
Set it to whatever you like. The only problem is that in a stock MySQL, it can only be set in increments of 1 second, which is too slow for some people.
Most heavily used production servers execute far too many queries to log them all. The slow log is a way of filtering the log so that we can see the ones which take a long time (most queries are likely to be executed almost instantly). It's a bit of a blunt instrument.
Set it to 1 sec if you like, you're probably not going to run out of disc space or create a performance problem by doing that.
It's really about the risk of enabling the slow log- don't do it if you feel it's likely to cause further disc or performance problems.
Of course you could enable the slow log on a non-production server and put simulated load through, but that is never quite the same.
Peter Zaitsev posted a nice article about using the slow query log. One thing he notes is important is to also consider how often a certain query is used. Reports run once a day are not important to be fast. But something that is run very often might be a problem even if it takes half a second. And you cant detect that without the microslow patch.
Not only is it a blunt instrument as far as resolution is concerned, but also it is MySQL-instance wide, so that if you have different databases with differing performancy requirements you're kind of out of luck. Obviously there are ways around that, but it's important to keep that in mind when setting your slow log setting.
Aside from performance requirements of your application, another factor to consider is what you're trying to log. Are you using the log to catch queries that would threaten the stability of your db instance (ones that cause deadlocks or Cartesian joins, for instance) or queries that affect the performance for specific users and that might require a little tuning? That will influence where you set your threshold.