How much time does MySQL need to build an index - mysql

How much time does MySQL need to build an index of a table with 30,000,000 entries that are strings of length 256?
At the moment it seems to take hours and I don't know how long I should wait till I conclude that MySql simply failed at building an index.

You may run SHOW PROCESSLIST \G in mysql console to watch its state. I had a similar problem just a couple of hours ago, but my table was much smaller.
Here a list of thread states you will definitely need. After an hour of waiting I realized that ALTER TABLE CREATE INDEX is in Locked state, I needed to restart mysqld and run the statement once again. That time I had index built in 15 minutes.
By the way, I recommend to run index creation from mysql console, GUI tools may add some spices to the process.

it could easily take hours. it all depends on the machine specs, load, etc etc. to see whether it's failed, check something like top or watch your hard drives - if they're going mad it's still indexing.

Depending on your OS you may check for disk activity (i.e. does it reads/writes DB files) to find out if it failed or not.

Related

"Waiting for table flush" Against Analyze Command

I was trying to run analyze command on a table out of 900 tables in mysql 5.7.30. Its stuck my all db process-list and connections spike immediate and lot of commands found with state "Waiting for table flush" even our max_connection parameter reaches at 2500. We are running the analyze table command from last 3 years but from last 1 month we notice this issue 4th time. If we didn't analyze our tables then we see severe performance issues and lot of queries enter into state "statistics". Whats your thoughts on it
You most definitely shouldn't be running ANALYZE regularly or automatically. It sounds like you were dodging the bullet of queries stuck in the waiting for able flush state purely because the load on your servers was sufficiently low that you didn't notice it before. You should only ever run this on a table sparingly when you have clear, definitive evidence that the index statistics on that table are sufficiently detached from reality to cause the query optimiser to regularly come up with egregiously poor execution plan.

Very long-running mysql process

I have a long-running mysql process to update a very large table where the auto-incrementing ID field needs to be changed from INT32 to INT64 (BIGINT). The data size is about 150GB and there are ~2.4B rows.
This is straightforward enough, and the alter table has been taking about 3 days now and is still running:
Is there any way to either (1) track progress here (or maybe even guesstimate how long it would take)? or (2) any other things I can do to expedite this other than cross my fingers?
Have you seen this: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/monitor-alter-table-performance-schema.html
It might be too late to get the progress for the alter that is currently running. You have to enable a performance_schema instrument, and I don't know offhand if it would apply retroactively if you enable it now.
Another suggestion I have, also for future alterations, not for the one currently running on your server, is to use pt-online-schema-change. At my last job, we used this for dozens of alterations on large tables like yours every week. It has an option to report progress, and even better, it does not block access to the table while it's running.

MySQL queries very slow - occasionally

I'm running MariaDB 10.2.31 on Ubuntu 18.4.4 LTS.
On a regular basis I encounter the following conundrum - especially when starting out in the morning, that is when my DEV environment has been idle for the night - but also during the day from time to time.
I have a table (this applies to other tables as well) with approx. 15.000 rows and (amongst others) an index on a VARCHAR column containing on average 5 to 10 characters.
Notably, most columns including this one are GENERATED ALWAYS AS (JSON_EXTRACT(....)) STORED since 99% of my data comes from a REST API as JSON-encoded strings (and conveniently I simply store those in one column and extract everything else).
When running a query on that column WHERE colname LIKE 'text%' I find query-result durations of i.e. 0.006 seconds. Nice. When I have my query EXPLAINed, I can see that the index is being used.
However, as I have mentioned, when I start out in the morning, this takes way longer (14 seconds this morning). I know about the query cache and I tried this with query cache turned off (both via SET GLOBAL query_cache_type=OFF and RESET QUERY CACHE). In this case I get consistent times of approx. 0.3 seconds - as expected.
So, what would you recommend I should look into? Is my DB sleeping? Is there such a thing?
There are two things that could be going on:
1) Cold caches (overnight backup, mysqld restart, or large processing job results in this particular index and table data being evicted from memory).
2) Statistics on the table go stale and the query planner gets confused until you run some queries against the table and the statistics get refreshed. You can force an update using ANALYZE TABLE table_name.
3) Query planner heisenbug. Very common in MySQL 5.7 and later, never seen it before on MariaDB so this is rather unlikely.
You can get to the bottom of this by enablign the following in the config:
log_output='FILE'
log_slow_queries=1
log_slow_verbosity='query_plan,explain'
long_query_time=1
Then review what is in the slow log just after you see a slow occurrence. If the logged explain plan looks the same for both slow and fast cases, you have a cold caches issue. If they are different, you have a table stats issue and you need to cron ANALYZE TABLE at the end of the over night task that reads/writes a lot to that table. If that doesn't help, as a last resort, hard code an index hint into your query with FORCE INDEX (index_name).
Enable your slow query log with log_slow_verbosity=query_plan,explain and the long_query_time sufficient to catch the results. See if occasionally its using a different (or no) index.
Before you start your next day, look at SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE "innodb_buffer_pool%" and after your query look at the values again. See how many buffer pool reads vs read requests are in this status output to see if all are coming off disk.
As #Solarflare mentioned, backups and nightly activity might be purging the innodb buffer pool of cached data and reverting bad to disk to make it slow again. As part of your nightly activites you could set innodb_buffer_pool_dump_now=1 to save the pages being hot before scripted activity and innodb_buffer_pool_load_now=1 to restore it.
Shout-out and Thank you to everyone giving valuable insight!
From all the tips you guys gave I think I am starting to understand the problem better and beginning to narrow it down:
First thing I found was my default innodb_buffer_pool_size of 134 MB. With the sort and amount of data I'm processing this is ridiculously low - so I was able to increase it.
Very helpful post: https://dba.stackexchange.com/a/27341
And from the docs: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/innodb-buffer-pool-resize.html
Now that I have increased it to close to 2GB and am able to monitor its usage and RAM usage in general (cli: cat /proc/meminfo) I realize that my 4GB RAM is in fact on the low side of things. I am nowhere near seeing any unused overhead (buffer usage still at 99% and free RAM around 100MB).
I will start to optimize RAM usage of my daemon next and see where this leads - but this will not free enough RAM altogether.
#danblack mentioned innodb_buffer_pool_dump_now and innodb_buffer_pool_load_now. This is an interesting approach to maybe use whenever the daemon accesses the DB as I would love to separate my daemon's buffer usage from the front end's (apparently this is not possible!). I will look into this further but as my daemon is running all the time (not only at night) this might not be feasible.
#Gordan Bobic mentioned "refreshing" DBtables by using ANALYZE TABLE tableName. I found this to be quite fast and incorporated it into the daemon after each time it does an extensive read/write. This increases daemon run times by a few seconds but this is no issue at all. And I figure I can't go wrong with it :)
So, in the end I believe my issue to be a combination of things: Too small buffer size, too small RAM, too many read/write operations for that environment (evicting buffered indexes etc.).
Also I will have to learn more about memory allocation etc and optimize this better (large-pages=1 etc).

MySQL query slowing down until restart

I have a service that sits on top of a MySQL 5.5 database (INNODB). The service has a background job that is supposed to run every week or so. On a high level the background job does the following:
Do some initial DB read and write in one transaction
Execute UMQ (described below) with a set of parameters in one transaction.
If no records are returned we are done!
Process the result from UMQ (this is a bit heavy so it is done outside of any DB
transaction)
Write the outcome of the previous step to DB in one transaction (this
writes to tables queried by UMQ and ensures that the same records are not found again by UMQ).
Goto step 2.
UMQ - Ugly Monster Query: This is a nasty database query that joins a bunch of tables, has conditions on columns in several of these tables and includes a NOT EXISTS subquery with some more joins and conditions. UMQ includes ORDER BY also has LIMIT 1000. Even though the query is bad I have done what I can here - there are indexes on all columns filtered on and the joins are all over foreign key relations.
I do expect UMQ to be heavy and take some time, which is why it's executed in a background job. However, what I'm seeing is rapidly degrading performance until it eventually causes a timeout in my service (maybe 50 times slower after 10 iterations).
First I thought that it was because the data queried by UMQ changes (see step 4 above) but that wasn't it because if I took the last query (the one that caused the timeout) from the slow query log and executed it myself directly I got the same behavior only until I restated the MySQL service. After restart the exact query on the exact same data that took >30 seconds before restart now took <0.5 seconds. I can reproduce this behavior every time by restoring the database to it's initial state and restarting the process.
Also, using the trick described in this question I could see that the query scans around 60K rows after restart as opposed to 18M rows before. EXPLAIN tells me that around 10K rows should be scanned and the result of EXPLAIN is always the same. No other processes are accessing the database at the same time and the lock_time in the slow query log is always 0. SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS before and after restart gives me no hints.
So finally the question: Does anybody have any clue of why I'm seeing this behavior? And how can I analyze this further?
I have the feeling that I need to configure MySQL differently in some way but I have searched and tested like crazy without coming up with anything that makes a difference.
Turns out that the behavior I saw was the result of how the MySQL optimizer uses InnoDB statistics to decide on an execution plan. This article put me on the right track (even though it does not exactly discuss my problem). The most important thing I learned from this is that MySQL calculates statistics on startup and then once in a while. This statistics is then used to optimize queries.
The way I had set up the test data the table T where most writes are done in step 4 started out as empty. After each iteration T would contain more and more records but the InnoDB statistics had not yet been updated to reflect this. Because of this the MySQL optimizer always chose an execution plan for UMQ (which includes a JOIN with T) that worked well when T was empty but worse and worse the more records T contained.
To verify this I added an ANALYZE TABLE T; before every execution of UMQ and the rapid degradation disappeared. No lightning performance but acceptable. I also saw that leaving the database for half an hour or so (maybe a bit shorter but at least more than a couple of minutes) would allow the InnoDB statistics to refresh automatically.
In a real scenario the relative difference in index cardinality for the tables involved in UMQ will look quite different and will not change as rapidly so I have decided that I don't really need to do anything about it.
thank you very much for the analysis and answer. I've been searching this issue for several days during ci on mariadb 10.1 and bacula server 9.4 (debian buster).
The situation was that after fresh server installation during a CI cycle, the first two tests (backup and restore) runs smoothly on unrestarted mariadb server and only the third test showed that one particular UMQ took about 20 minutes (building directory tree during restore process from the table with about 30k rows).
Unless the mardiadb server was restarted or table has been analyzed the problem would not go away. ANALYZE TABLE or the restart changed the cardinality of the fields and internal query processing exactly as stated in the linked article.

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.