I have read every possible answer to this question and searched via Google in order to find the correct answer to the following question, but I am rather a novice and don't seem to get a clear understanding.
A lot I've read has to do with web servers, but I don't have a web server, but an intranet database.
I have a MySQL dsatabase in a Windows server at work.
I will have many users accessing this database constantly to perform simple queries and writting back to it new records.
The read/write will not be that heavy (chances are 50-100 users will do so exactly at the same time, even if 1000's could be connected).
The GUI will be either via Excel forms and/or Access.
What I need to know is the maximum number of active connections I can have at any given time to the database.
I know I can change the number on Mysql Admin however I really need to know what will really work...
I don't want to put 1000 users if the system will really handle 100 correctly (after that, although connected, the performance will be too slow, for example)
Any ideas or own experiences will be appreciated
This depends mainly on your server hardware (RAM, cpu, networking) and server load for other processes if not dedicated to the database. I think you won't have an absolute answer and the best way is testing.
I think something like 1000 should work ok, as long as you use 64 bit MySQL server. With 32 bit, too many connections may create virtual memory pressure - a connection has an own thread, and every thread needs a stack, so the stack memory will reduce possible size of the buffer pool and other buffers.
MySQL generally does not slow down if you have many idle connections, however special commands e.g "show processlist" or "kill", that enumerate every connection will be somewhat slower.
If idle connection stays idle for too long (idle time exceeds wait_timeout parameter), it is dropped by the server. If this is the case in your possible scenario, you might want to increase wait_timeout (its default value is 8 hours)
Related
So I have developped this website with Symfony3 and Doctrine. I have one major concern about performance with MySQL and more specifically the number of simultaneous open connexions.
For the moment, one to five users are online on the website. What happens if, let's say, 1,500 users connect within one minute? Does Symfony3 or Doctrine handle this kind of situations? How can I be sure the website doesn't go down providing me with the Too many connections MySQL error?
And if I go up to 5,000? And 10,000? The server has 4GB of RAM and a 2.40Ghz mono-core processor but I wouldn't worry about the hardware as I'm more concerned about MySQL.
These situations already happened in the past but I was running the website with Wordpress and W3 Total Cache plugin. Should I consider using a cache manager such as memcached or else?
In short, I'm concerned about the website becoming unavailable in case of sudden high trafic (and thought of the MysQL Too many connections error in first but I might be missing something even more important).
Thanks for lightening me out on this one as I'm not fully aware about performance issues with Symfony.
I believe it does open one connection per visitor. Regardless of whether it does or not however neither Symfony or Doctrine has a magic bullet to handle every load/connection scenario.
Why don't you use a load testing tool (there are many) and see how it actually pans out? In my experience predicting a bottleneck is useless, as they will always crop up where you least expect it.
For example, the MySQL connection limit is only one part of the optimisation puzzle. It's no good just worrying about connection limits, you need to respond to web requests as quickly and efficiently as possible to free up MySQL connection resources (and other resources your app is using). So if your server is slow you will run out of connections (or some other resource) almost immediately under significant load, regardless of MySQL connection limits.
That said, those server specifications seem a little low for 5-10k users per minute. I wouldn't expect a machine like that to handle that kind of load without some serious optimisation/caching/etc.
The symfony performance page is a good starter, and there is also a good article on caching - there's a ton of available material on the subject. Good luck! :)
If you use php-fpm it depends on pm.max_children in fpm/pool.d/www.conf.
pm.max_children refers to the maximum number of concurrent PHP-FPM processes allowed to exist in such a pool. If the volume of incoming requests requires the creation of more PHP-FPM processes than the number allowed by the max_children limit, those additional requests are backlogged in a queue to await service.
So when pm.max_children > max_connections (my.cnf) and active users > max_connections you will get "Too many connections".
I'm not sure if caching would be the correct term for this but my objective is to build a website that will be displaying data from my database.
My problem: There is a high probability of a lot of traffic and all data is contained in the database.
My hypothesized solution: Would it be faster if I created a separate program (in java for example) to connect to the database every couple of seconds and update the html files (where the data is displayed) with the new data? (this would also increase security as users will never be connecting to the database) or should I just have each user create a connection to MySQL (using php) and get the data?
If you've had any experiences in a similar situation please share, and I'm sorry if I didn't word the title correctly, this is a pretty specific question and I'm not even sure if I explained myself clearly.
Here are some thoughts for you to think about.
First, I do not recommend you create files but trust MySQL. However, work on configuring your environment to support your traffic/application.
You should understand your data a little more (How much is the data in your tables change? What kind of queries are you running against the data. Are your queries optimized?)
Make sure your tables are optimized and indexed correctly. Make sure all your query run fast (nothing causing a long row locks.)
If your tables are not being updated very often, you should consider using MySQL cache as this will reduce your IO and increase the query speed. (BUT wait! If your table is being updated all the time this will kill your server performance big time)
Your query cache is set to "ON". Based on my experience this is always bad idea unless your data does not change on all your tables. When you have it set to "ON" MySQL will cache every query. Then as soon as they data in the table changes, MySQL will have to clear the cached query "it is going to work harder while clearing up cache which will give you bad performance." I like to keep it set to "ON DEMAND"
from there you can control which query should be cache and which should not using SQL_CACHE and SQL_NO_CACHE
Another thing you want to review is your server configuration and specs.
How much physical RAM does your server have?
What types of Hard Drives are you using? SSD is not at what speed do they rotate? perhaps 15k?
What OS are you running MySQL on?
How is the RAID setup on your hard drives? "RAID 10 or RAID 50" will help you out a lot here.
Your processor speed will make a big different.
If you are not using MySQL 5.6.20+ you should consider upgrading as MySQL have been improved to help you even more.
How much RAM does your server have? is your innodb_log_buffer_size set to 75% of your total physical RAM? Are you using innodb table?
You can also use MySQL replication to increase the read sources of the data. So you have multiple servers with the same data and you can point half of your traffic to read from server A and the other half from Server B. so the same work will be handled by multiple server.
Here is one argument for you to think about: Facebook uses MySQL and have millions of hits per seconds but they are up 100% of the time. True they have trillion dollar budget and their network is huge but the idea here is to trust MySQL to get the job done.
I made a program that receives user input and stores it on a MySQL database. I want to implement this program on several computers so users can upload information to the same database simoultaneously. The database is very simple, it has just seven columns and the user will only enter four of them.
There would be around two-three hundred computers uploading information (not always at the same time but it can happen). How reliable is this? Is that even possible?
It's my first script ever so I appreciate if you could point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance.
Having simultaneous connections from the same script depends on how you're processing the requests. The typical choices are by forking a new Python process (usually handled by a webserver), or by handling all the requests with a single process.
If you're forking processes (new process each request):
A single MySQL connection should be perfectly fine (since the total number of active connections will be equal to the number of requests you're handling).
You typically shouldn't worry about multiple connections since a single MySQL connection (and the server), can handle loads much higher than that (completely dependent upon the hardware of course). In which case, as #GeorgeDaniel said, it's more important that you focus on controlling how many active processes you have and making sure they don't strain your computer.
If you're running a single process:
Yet again, a single MySQL connection should be fast enough for all of those requests. If you want, you can look into grouping the inserts together, as well as multiple connections.
MySQL is fast and should be able to easily handle 200+ simultaneous connections that are writing/reading, regardless of how many active connections you have open. And yet again, the performance you get from MySQL is completely dependent upon your hardware.
Yes, it is possible to have up to that many number of mySQL connectins. It depends on a few variables. The maximum number of connections MySQL can support depends on the quality of the thread library on a given platform, the amount of RAM available, how much RAM is used for each connection, the workload from each connection, and the desired response time.
The number of connections permitted is controlled by the max_connections system variable. The default value is 151 to improve performance when MySQL is used with the Apache Web server.
The important part is to properly handle the connections and closing them appropriately. You do not want redundant connections occurring, as it can cause slow-down issues in the long run. Make sure when coding that you properly close connections.
My ISP (1&1) informs me that the maximum number of MySQL connections I can have open at any one time is 18. My LAMP stack application uses SQL for almost every page but I close each connection after use. I know each connection will only be open for a few ms and that there are many variables here, but does anyone have a feel for how many users 18 connections will cater for? I want to preempt problems down the line when my number of users increases.
This seems bizarre. I understand that there are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that throttle connections, but 18 seems arbitrarily low. The real performance hit MySQL is not the number of connections but the volume & complexity of the queries.
So first recommendation would be to genuinely find another ISP. Barring that I would recommend disabling persistent connections on your MySQL queries. But still that seems like it would run against the 18 limit if/when a rush of activity happens. Genuinely, find another ISP or ask your current one to validly explain how anyone can work with such a limit.
I have been researching this for a while but got no convinced answer.
From mysql tutorial, the default connections number is less than two hundred, and it says max_connection_num can be set to 2000 in Linux box as long as you have enough resource. I think this number is far from enough in real world deployment as there might be millions people visit your website at the same time.
There are couple of articles talking about how to optimize to reduce time cost by each query. But none of them tells me how this issue is root caused. I think there must be some mechanism like queue to prevent massive connections from happening simultaneously. otherwise you will finally get "too connection" exception.
anyone has some expertise in this area? thank you.
There are several options.
Connection pooling
As you mentionned: queuing. If too many clients connect at the same time, then the application layer should handle this exception, put the request to sleep for a short period of time and try again. Requests lasting more than a couple of seconds should usually be banned in such a high traffic environment.
Load balancing through replication and/or clustering
Normally, your application is supposed to reuse connections already established. However, the language you chose to implement your application introduces limitations. If you use Java or .Net you can have pool of connections. For PHP it is not the case, you can check this discussion
If you exceed the max_connection_num, you do get a too many connections error. But if you really have 1 million users at your web server at the exact same time, you can't handle that with one server anyway, 1 million concurrent connections really requires a very big farm to handle.
However, the clients to your database is a webapp, that webapp usually connects to the database through abstractions called a connection pool, which does limit the number of connections to the database on the client side as long as all the database connections goes through that same pool.