Why would restarting MySQL make my site faster? - mysql

my site started dragging lately, the queries taking exceptionally longer than I would expect with properly tuned indexes. I just restarted the mysql server after 31 days uptime and every query is now substantially faster and the whole site renders 3-4 times faster.
Would there be anything that jumps out at you as to why this may have been? Improper settings on my.cnf perhaps? Any ideas as to what I can start looking at to try and pinpoint why?
thanks
updated note: I have a 16GB dedicated db box and mysql runs at about 71% of memory after a week or so.

Try to execute show processlist;, maybe there are some long lasting threads that were not killed for some reason.
Similarly execute SHOW SESSION STATUS LIKE 'Created%'; to check if mysql hasn't created to many temporary tables.
Server restart automatically closes all open temp tables and kills threads, so the application might run quicker.

Do you have temporary table(s) that might not be getting cleared/collected?

I would suggest using MySQL Enterprise for analysis purposes. It comes with a 30 day trial. We just used it. We got alerts such as :
CRITICAL Alert - Table Scans Excessive
The target server does not appear to be using indexes efficiently.
CRITICAL Alert - Connection Usage Excessive
CRITICAL Alert - CPU Usage Excessive
WARNING Alert - MyISAM Key Cache Has Sub-Optimal Hit Rate
Just something to explore!

Related

Aurora database exceeding capacity due to "/io/file/myisam/kfile" Wait

This morning, one of our Aurora clusters suddenly began experiencing high latency, slower running queries and was being reported as exceeding exceeding capacity - with up to 20 sessions for the db.r5.large instance which has only 2 CPUs.
There we no code changes, no deploy, no background process or any other cause we can identify. The higher latency is intermittent, occurring every 10 minutes and lasting for about as long. The Aurora monitoring isn't helping much, the only change of note being higher latency on the all queries (selects, updates and deletes).
Under Performance Metrics, the cases where usage spikes - we're seeing that of the total 20 sessions, these are attributed almost solely to the io/file/myisam/kfile Wait. Researching online has yielded very little and so I'm somewhat stumped as to what this means, and how to go about getting to the cause of the issue. Looking at the SQL queries ran during spikes, their slow run time appears more caused by the intermittent issue - as opposed to the being the cause of it.
So my question is: can anyone explain what the 'myisam/kfile' Wait is, and how I can use this knowledge to help diagnose the cause of the problem here?
My feeling is that it's one of those rare occurrences where an AWS instance unexplainably goes rogue at a level below which we can directly control and is only solved by spinning up a new instance (even where all else is equal from a configuration and code perspective). All the same, I'd love to better understand the issue here, especially when none of our DB table are MyISAM, all being innoDB.
Is there a table called kfile? How big is it? What operations are being performed?
While the problem is occurring, do SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST; to see what is running. That may give a good clue.
If the slowlog is turned on, look at it shortly after the problem has subsided; probably the naughty query will be at the end of the list. Publish pt-query-digest path_to_slowlog. The first one or two queries are very likely to be the villains.
Check SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;. Near the front will be the "latest deadlock". That may be a clue.
In most situations most of the graphs don't provide any useful information. When something does go wrong, it is not obvious which graph to look at. I would look for graphs that look "different" in sync with the problem. The one you show us perhaps indicates that there is a 20-second timeout, and everyone is stuck until they hit that timeout.
Do you run any ALTERs? When do backups occur?
Are you using MyISAM? Don't. That ENGINE does not allow concurrency, hence could lead to a bunch of queries piling up. More on converting to InnoDB: http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/myisam2innodb

MySQL sudden performance drop

One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from a recent slowdown in the DB (since last week).
Code hasn't changed, data may have changed a little but not significantly so at this stage I'm just exploring DB configuration (as we are on a managed hosting platform, end have had some similar issues in the past).
Unfortunately I'm out of my depth a bit... could anyone please take a look at the output from SHOW STATUS below and see if any of it sets alarm bells off? The only thing I've spotted so far is that key_reads vs key_read_requests don't seem quite right.
Our setup is 2 servers replicated, with all reads done from the slave. Queries which run in 0.01 secs on the master are taking up to 7 secs on the slave... and this has only started recently.
All tables are MyIsam and inserts/updates are negligible (updates happen out of hours). Front end is an ASP .NET website (.NET 4) running on IIS8 with a devart component for data access.
Thanks!
SHOW STATUS output is here: http://pastebin.com/w6xDeD48
Other factors can impact MySQL performance:
virus scanning software -> I had a issue with McAfee bogging out peformance due to it scanning temporary table files
Other services running on server?
Have you tried a EXPLAIN SELECT on the query? This would given you an indication of the index size. As #Liath indicated the indexes may be out of date on the slave but find on the master.
Just an update in case it ever helps anyone else in future - it looks like the culprit might be the query cache for now, as we are seeing better performance with it turned off (still not quite as good as we had before the issue).
So we will try to tune it a little and get back to great performance!

Started optimize table on Magento db, but sites are down. Can I kill it and how?

All my websites are running super slow because I tried to optimize the Magento DB in phpmyadmin in an effort to get the sites to speed UP. They're so slow they might as well be down. I want the pain to stop. Can I kill the optimize and how would I do that? Or is it better just to wait until it's finished.
For the record, I have a backup of the database.
Usually you can KILL any operation you don't want to finish, but be aware that the time to undo the operation may in fact be longer than it takes to simply complete.
Unless you're running a massive installation it sounds like your database needs to be tuned better. MySQL comes with a default my.cnf configuration that is terrible, barely any memory allocated to it, and runs slowly.
Secondly, you might be running a lot of queries that are slow because they're missing indexes. How much data is in this table you're trying to optimize? SHOW TABLE STATUS will give you an idea.

How to benchmark and optimize a really database-intensive Rails action?

There is an action in the admin section of a client's site, say Admin::Analytics (that I did not build but have to maintain) that compiles site usage analytics by performing a couple dozen, rather intensive database queries. This functionality has always been a bottleneck to application performance whenever the analytics report is being compiled. But, the bottleneck has become so bad lately that, when accessed, the site comes to a screeching halt and hangs indefinitely. Until yesterday I never had a reason to run the "top" command on the server, but doing so I realized that Admin::Analytics#index causes mysqld to spin at upwards of 350+% CPU power on the quad-core, production VPS.
I have downloaded fresh copies of production data and the production log. However, when I access Admin::Analytics#index locally on my development box, while using the production data, it loads in about 10 - 12 seconds (and utilizes ~ 150+% of my dual-core CPU), which sadly is normal. I suppose there could be a discrepancy in mysql settings that has suddenly come into play. Also, a mysqldump of the database is now 531 MB, when it was only 336 MB 28 days ago.  Anyway, I do not have root access on the VPS, so tweaking mysqld performance would be cumbersome, and I would really like to get to the exact cause of this problem. However, the production logs don't contain info. on the queries; they merely report the length that these requests took, which average out to a few minutes apiece (although they seemed to have caused mysqld to stall for much longer than this and prompting me to request our host to reboot mysqld just to get our site back up in one instance).
I suppose I can try upping the log level in production to solicit info. on the database queries being performed by Admin::Analytics#index, but at the same time I'm afraid to replicate this behavior in production because I don't feel like calling our host up to restart mysqld again! This action contains a single database request in its controller, and a couple dozen prepared statements embedded in its view!
How would you proceed to benchmark/diagnose and optimize/fix this action?!
(Aside: Obviously I would like to completely replace this functionality with Google Analytics or a similar solution, but I need fix this problem before proceeding.)
I'd recommend taking a look at this article:
http://axonflux.com/building-and-scaling-a-startup
Particularly, query_reviewer and newrelic have been a life-saver for me.
I appreciate all the help with this, but what turned out to be the fix for this was to implement a couple of indexes on the Analytics table to cater to the queries in this action. A simple Rails migration to add the indexes and the action now loads in less than a second both on my dev box and on prod!

How do I check if my mysql database causes slow down

I have around 3 websites residing in a server which is being shared with other teams. I have been notified that there is a huge increase in CPU usage and we need to lower it down. I doubt my websites are causing this.
I have been using SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST in MySQL and 90% of the time shows queries from other databases. But I think executing multiple SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST commands is not enough proof. How can I verify that my databases aren't CPU hogs?
If you suspect that its a MySQL query, try inspecting the MySQL Slow Query Log. The log will help you identify queries that take long time to execute. You can then copy-paste the query text into a MySQL query session, execute it and observe the CPU usage.
You may also want to install different MySQL release, that allows to track exact user statistics and some other things:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/16/mysql-releases-with-percona-patches/