This blog was originally published in January 2023 and was updated in April 2024. Recently I was working with a customer wherein our focus was to carry out a performance audit of their multiple MySQL database nodes. We started looking into the stats of the performance schema. While working, the customer raised two interesting questions: […]

This blog was originally published in June of 2023 and updated in April of 2024.As a MySQL database administrator, keeping a close eye on the performance of your MySQL server is crucial to ensure optimal database operations. A monitoring tool like Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a popular choice among open source options for […]

In this blog post, we’ll review how to run Linux profilers such as perf and produce flame graphs on Kubernetes environments.

Flame graphs are a graphical representation of function calls. It shows which code paths are more busy on the CPU in given samples. They can be generated with any OS profiler that contains stack traces such as perf, eBPF, and SystemTap.

An example of a flame graph can be found below:

Each box is a function in the stack, and wider boxes mean more time the system was busy on CPU on these functions.

Kubernetes limitations

In Linux, by default, performance system events can’t be collected by unprivileged users. In regular environments, this can be easily worked around by running the profiler with a sudo privilege.

On the other hand, in Kubernetes environments, pods are the smallest deployable unit that consists of one or more containers. Exploits are generally targeted to …

This post was originally published in June 2020 and was updated in September 2023.

While there is no magic bullet for MySQL performance tuning, there are a few areas that can be focused on upfront that can dramatically improve the performance of your MySQL installation. While much information has been published on this topic over the years, I wanted to break down some of the more critical settings that anyone can implement with no guesswork required.

Depending on the version of MySQL you are running, some of the default values used in this post may differ from your install, but the premise is still largely the same.

What are the Benefits of MySQL Performance Tuning?

MySQL performance tuning offers several significant advantages for effective database management and optimization. Let’s explore these benefits in …

As businesses grow and develop, the requirements that they have for their data platform grow along with it. As such, one of the more common questions I get from my clients is whether or not their system will be able to endure an anticipated load increase. Or worse yet, sometimes I get questions about regaining normal operations after a traffic increase caused performance destabilization.

As the subject of this blog post suggests, this all comes down to proper capacity planning. Unfortunately, this topic is more of an art than a science, given that there is really no foolproof algorithm or approach that can tell you exactly where you might hit a bottleneck with server performance. But we can discuss common bottlenecks, how to assess them, and have a better understanding as to why proactive monitoring is so important when it comes to responding to traffic growth.

Hardware considerations

The first thing we have to consider …

Restoring a MySQL database backup is a crucial task that can sometimes be time-consuming, especially for large databases. Monitoring the progress of the restore process is essential to estimate completion time and ensure everything is proceeding smoothly.

In this blog post, we will explore two distinct and effective methods to calculate the percentage progress of the MySQL restore process.

• Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics
• Pipe viewer utility

By following these approaches, we can effectively monitor the restoration process and manage your MySQL database restoration efficiently.

Monitoring MySQL database restore progress using Linux native Input/Output (I/O) statistics

We would use the /proc/<pid>/io file, which contains the IO statistics for each running process. For this particular case, we would use the pid of the MySQL restore process, which can provide …

Blip is a new MySQL monitor that collects and reports server metrics. But wasn’t this problem solved long ago? Not really…

Blip is a new MySQL monitor that collects and reports server metrics. But wasn’t this problem solved long ago? Not really…

2022 was an exciting year for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). We’ve added and improved many features, including Alerting and Backup Management. These updates are designed to keep databases running at peak performance and simplify database operations. But as companies grow and see more demand for their databases, we need to ensure that PMM also remains scalable so you don’t need to worry about its performance while tending to the rest of your environment.

PMM2 uses VictoriaMetrics (VM) as its metrics storage engine. Percona’s co-Founder Peter Zaitsev wrote a detailed post about migration from Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics, One of the most significant differences in …

Blip is a new open source MySQL metrics collector, or “MySQL monitor” for short. But isn’t collecting MySQL metrics easy? And don’t we already have some open source MySQL monitors? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…