MySQL database administration is a challenging as well a rewarding affair. There are many things to be taken care of, and if you do it with a mastermind, it can act as a treasure-trove to your business in terms of effective data management. You need to have adequate knowledge about this so that it can benefit your business in the best way. We will discuss some expert insights to get your MySQL database servers to do more than what they are, from profiling workload to the advanced rules of indexing.
As you may face with any relational databases, MySQL also may offer you a bit complicated time to master, but the time and effort you spend on it are worthwhile in the long run. One noted fact is that it is the same common mistakes DBAs tend to make underlie most of the common performance problems in MySQL. To ensure that your MySQL servers function full-fledged, it is crucial to avoid these common mistakes. Without further ado, let us dive into the tips by experts for MySQL performance tuning.
4 top tips for better performance of MySQL
No.1: Your workload must be profiled
The ideal model of understanding how your database server spends its time is by profiling the workload. With this, you can further fine-tune the most expensive and time queries. We can count times as the most crucial metric while you raise a query against the DBMS server; you care only little about anything else than the query execution speed.
The best approach for workload proofing is with the tools like query analyzer from MySQL Enterprise Monitor or the pt-query-digest as in Percona Toolkit etc. All these tools can help capture the queries that servers execute and then return the tables of such tasks in response time. With this easy to understand depiction, you will find out the most expensive and time-taking tasks and further work on it. Workload profiling tools can also help similar group queries and allow the users to see the queries, which take a longer time.
No. 2: Know about the fundamental resources
To function well, any database server may need fundamental resources as:
- CPU
- Memory
- Hard disk, and
- A network
If any or all of these are weak or overloaded, there is a chance that the database server is performing poorly. So, understanding each of these fundamental resources’ status is crucial in ensuring the proper upkeep of the database systems.
While getting the hardware components for MySQL database setup, always ensure that you implement only good-performing components. It is also important to balance these well against each other to handle the load together properly. It is seen that often the organizations will choose servers with faster CPUs and high-performance disks, but combined with the other two components functioning poorly, this extra investment goes in vain. Measures like adding memory can be the cheapest way to increase the performance, especially on the disk-bound workloads. In some cases, the disks may be over-utilized just because there is not enough memory to handle the server’s live working data sets.
Another example pointed out by RemoteDBA.com is the balance in terms of the CPU. In many cases, MySQL tends to perform well with faster CPUs as each query will run in a single thread and cannot be parallelized across various CPUs. In terms of troubleshooting, one should check the utilization and performance of all four fundamental resources to determine whether each of these is performing optimally. Having this knowledge can help you to work around well to optimize the overall database server performance.
No. 3: Never use MySQL just as a queue
Sometimes, the queue-like accesses may sneak into your enterprise application without even alerting you. Say, for example, if there is a set status of an item for a given worker, the process may clam before acting on it, it may end up in creating an unwanted queue. As we can see daily, marking the emails unsent, and then sending them and again marking assent is an example of how to do it.
Having queues cause two major problems. They will serialize the workload and can also prevent the tasks from being executed parallelly. This will result in a table containing the work in process and the historical data from the jobs that were processed long back. Both these can add more latency to the application and also load to MySQL, causing troubles.
No. 4: Filter the results by putting the cheapest ones first
Another effective way to optimize MySQL performance is to put the imprecise and cheap works first and then list out further based on the hardship of work in the resulting data. Say, for example, if you are looking for something within a geographical radius, then the first tool programmers tend to use may be the great-circle formula (Haversine) to compute the distance along a spherical surface. The problem here is this formula requires fairly complicated trigonometric operations, which can be a big load on the CPU. As a result, great circle calculations may run very slow and also skyrocket the CPU utilization.
Before applying this formula, you can pare down the records to a smaller subset and then trim the result set to a smaller circle. For example, a square containing a precise or imprecise circle may be easier to do this. With this approach, the region outside this square will not be involved, and there is also no need for the CPU-intensive trigonometric functions. The ultimate result is increased speed of response.
To improvise MySQL performance, you can also make use of several other smart tips like knowing the scalability traps, not focusing too much on the configuration, watching out for the pagination queries, saving of the statistics, and acting on the same, learning the basic rules of effective indexing and leveraging the expertise of your peers and database experts, etc. The key here is to remain updated and use the best methods available.
Recent Comments