How to speed up MySQL INSERTs/UPDATEs? - mysql

I have three large MySQL tables. They are approaching 2 million records. Two of the tables are InnoDB and are currently around 500 MB in size. The other table is MyISAM and is about 2.5 GB.
We run an import script from FileMaker to insert and update records in these tables but lately it has become very slow - only inserting a few hundred records per hour.
What can I do to increase performance to make inserts and updates happen faster?

For INSERT it could have to do with the indexes you have defined on the tables (they have to be updated after each INSERT). Could you post more information about them? And are there triggers set on the tables?
For UPDATE it is a different story, it could be that not the record update is slow but finding the record is slow. Could you try to change the UPDATE into a SELECT and see if it is still slow? If yes, then you should investigate your indexes.

For the Innodb table, if it's an acceptable risk, I'd consider changing the innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit level. Some more details in this blog post, along with some more Innodb tuning pointers.
For both engines, batching INSERTs together can speed things up to a point. See doc.
What version of MySQL are you running? There have been many improvements with the new InnoDB "Plugin" engine and concurrency of operations on servers with multiple processors.

Is the query slow when executed on MySQL from the command line?
If you're using the Execute SQL Script step from FileMaker, that connects and disconnects after every call, causing major slowdowns when executing large numbers of queries. We've had clients switch to our JDBC plugin (self-promotion disclaimer here) to avoid this, resulting in major speedups.

It turns out the reason for the slowness was from the FileMaker side of things. Exporting the FileMaker records to a CSV and running INSERT/UPDATE commands resulted in very fast execution.

Related

Concurrent mysql queries causing large query queue's

I have a large mysql database that receives large volumes of queries, each query takes around 5-10 seconds to perform.
Queries involve checking records, updating records and adding records.
I'm experiencing some significant bottle necks in the query executions, which I believe is due to incoming queries having to 'queue' whilst current queries are using records that these incoming queries need to access.
Is there a way, besides completely reformatting my database structure and SQL queries, to enable simultaneous use of database records by queries?
An INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operation locks the relevant tables - myISAM - or rows -InnoDB - until the operation completes. Be sure your query of this type are fastly commited .. and also chechck for you transacation isolating the part with relevant looking ..
For MySQL internal locking see: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/internal-locking.html
Also remeber that in mysql there are differente storage engine with different features eg:
The MyISAM storage engine supports concurrent inserts to reduce
contention between readers and writers for a given table: If a MyISAM
table has no holes in the data file (deleted rows in the middle), an
INSERT statement can be executed to add rows to the end of the table
at the same time that SELECT statements are reading rows from the
table.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/concurrent-inserts.html
eventually take a look at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/optimization.html

MySQL read-heavy having problems with inserts and updates on MyISAM

I have a database most tables are in MyISAM and have checked MySQLTuner and tuning-primer to optimize MySQL server variables such as key_buffer_size, max_connections, open_tables limit,etc. Reads are 80% and writes 20%.
I have been having problems lately that sometimes data is not inserted. I have checked several times if it was a problem on how it inserts the data, such as weird characters, but not a problem. It seems somehow the database is so busy that inserts and updates fail, there are about 4 tables that are heavy read. But still, doing inserts on tables that rarely have reads, it is not possible to insert. I understand MyISAM does table locks but I don't see how it can affect other tables to fail to insert as well if those are not being read.
Do you have any suggestions what to do?
The main reason I use MyISAM is that it's a lot faster than the selects I do with InnoDB. The queries always use index and I run explain extended to make sure all is correct and that response times are quite low to avoid server load and piling up connections.
Appreciate your comments.

Large number of INSERT statements locking inserts on other tables in MySQL 5.5

I'm trying to understand an issue I am having with a MySQL 5.5 server.
This server hosts a number of databases. Each day at a certain time a process runs a series of inserts into TWO tables within this database. This process lasts from 5 to 15 minutes depending on the amount of rows being inserted.
This process runs perfectly. But it has a very unexpected side effect. All other inserts and update's running on tables unrelated to the two being inserted to just sit and wait until the process has stopped. Reads and writes outside of this database work just fine and SELECT statements too are fine.
So how is it possible for a single table to block the rest of a database but not the entire server (due to loading)?
A bit of background:-
Tables being inserted to are MyISAM with 10 - 20 million rows.
MySQL is Percona V5.5 and is serving one slave both running on
Debian.
No explicit locking is called for by the process inserting the
records.
None of the Insert statements do not select data from any other
table. They are also INSERT IGNORE statements.
ADDITIONAL INFO:
While this is happening there are no LOCK table entries in PROCESS LIST and the processor inserting the records causing this problem does NOT issue any table locks.
I've already investigated the usual causes of table locking and I think I've rules them out. This behaviour is either something to do with how MySQL works, a quirk of having large database files or possibly even something to do with the OS/File System.
After a few weeks of trying things I eventually found this: Yoshinori Matsunobu Blog - MyISAM and Disk IO Scheduler
Yoshinori demonstrates that changing the scheduler queue to 100000 (from the default 128) dramatically improves the throughput of MyISAM on most schedulers.
After making this change to my system there were no longer any dramatic instances of database hang on MyISAM tables while this process was running. There was slight slowdown as to be expected with the volume of data but the system remained stable.
Anyone experiencing performance issues with MyISAM should read Yoshinori's blog entry and consider this fix.

mySQL Replication

We have an update process which currently takes over an hour and means that our DB is unusable during this period.
If I setup up replication would this solve the problem or would the replicated DB suffer from exactly the same problem that the tables would be locked during the update?
Is it possible to have the replicated DB prioritize reading over updating?
Thanks,
D
I suspect that with replication you're just going to be dupolicating the issue (unless most of the time is spent in CPU and only results in a couple of records being updated).
Without knowing a lot more about the scema, distribution and size of data and the update process its impossible to say how best to resolve the problem - but you might get some mileage out of using innodb instead of C-ISAM and making sure that the update is implemented as a number of discrete steps (e.g. using stored procuedures) rather than a single DML statement.
MySQL gives you the ability to run queries delaye. Example: "INSERT DELAYED INTO...", this will cause the query to only be executed when MYSQL has time to take the query.
Based on your input, it sounds like you are using MyISAM tables, MyISAM only support table-wide locking. That means that a single update will lock the whole database table until the query is completed. InnoDB on the other hand uses row locking, which will not cause SELECT queries to wait(hang) for updates to complete.
So you have the best chances of a better sysadmin life if you change to InnoDB :)
When it comes to replication it is pretty normal to seperate updates and selects to two different MySQL servers, and that does tend to work very well. But if you are using MyISAM tables and does a lot of updates, the locking issue itself will still be there.
So my 2 cents: First get rid of MyISAM, then consider replication or a better scaled MySQL server if the problem still exists. (The key for good performance in MySQL is to have at least the size of all indexes across all databases as physical RAM)

Is MySQL InnoDB is appropriate for this scenario?

My MysQL database contains multiple MyISAM tables, with each table containing millions of rows. There is a heavy insert load on the database, so I cannot issue SELECTs on that live database. Instead, I create a replica of the database for queries and conduct analysis on that.
For the analysis, I need to issue multiple parallel queries. The queries are independent (i.e., the results of the queries are not combined together), but they operate on same tables most of the time. As far as I know, the entire MyISAM table is locked for each query, which means parallel independent queries would be slow. Ideally, I would prefer an engine that supports "NO LOCKING". I am assuming MySQL doesnt have such an engine, so should I use InnoDB? I might be missing lot of things here. Please suggest what is the right path to take here.
Thanks
MyISAM read locks are compatible, so the SELECT queries won't lock each other.
If your analysis queries on the replica database don't write, only read, then it's OK to use MyISAM.
You could stick to MyISAM and use INSERT DELAYED:
When a client uses INSERT DELAYED, it gets an okay from the server at once, and the row is queued to be inserted when the table is not in use by any other thread.
Another major benefit of using INSERT DELAYED is that inserts from many clients are bundled together and written in one block. This is much faster than performing many separate inserts.