In this blog post, we’ll look at how we’ve improved wsrep-stages and related instrumentation in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Introduction

When you execute a workload and need to find out what the given thread is working on, “SHOW PROCESSLIST” comes to the top of your mind. It is an effective way to track the thread status. We decided to improve the stages in Percona XtraDB Cluster to make “SHOW PROCESSLIST” more meaningful.

In the blog below, we will check out the different wsrep-stages and the significance associated with them.

Loading of data

Running a simple insert/sysbench prepare workload. The state is stable as it mainly captures …

In this blog post, we’ll look at a transaction replay anomaly in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Introduction

Percona XtraDB Cluster/Galera replays a transaction if the data is non-conflicting but, the transaction happens to have conflicting locks.

Anomaly

Let’s understand this with an example:

• Let’s assume a two-node cluster (node-1 and node-2)
• Base table “t” is created as follows:

create database test;
use test;
create table t (i int, c char(20), primary key pk(i)) engine=innodb;
insert into t values (1, 'abc'), (2, 'abc'), (4, 'abc');
select * from t;
mysql> select * from t;
+---+------+
| i | c |
+---+------+
| 1 | abc |
| 2 | abc |
| 4 | abc |
+---+------+

• node-2 starts runs a transaction (trx-2):
…

In this blog post, we’ll look at how increasing the fc_limit can affect SELECT latency.

Introduction

Recent Percona XtraDB Cluster optimizations have exposed fc_limit contention. It was always there, but was never exposed as the Commit Monitor contention was more significant. As it happens with any optimization, once we solve the bigger contention issues, smaller contention issues start popping up. We have seen this pattern in InnoDB, and Percona XtraDB Cluster is no exception. In fact, it is good because it tells us that we are on the right track.

If you haven’t yet checked the performance blogs, then please visit here and …

In this blog post, we’ll look at a feature that recently added to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.16, that makes it easier to configure Percona XtraDB Cluster SSL for all related communications. It uses mode “encrypt=4”, and configures SSL for both IST/Galera communications and SST communications using the same SSL files. “encrypt=4” is a new encryption mode added in Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.16 (we’ll cover it in a later blog post).

If this option is used, this will override all other Galera/SST SSL-related file options. This is to ensure that a consistent configuration is applied. Using this option also means that the Galera/SST communications are …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how Percona XtraDB Cluster uses IST.

Introduction

Percona XtraDB Cluster uses the concept of an Incremental State Transfer (IST). When a node of the cluster leaves the cluster for a short period of time, it can rejoin the cluster by getting the delta set of missing changes from any active node in the cluster.

This process of getting the delta set of changes is named as IST in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Tracking IST Progress

The number of write-sets/changes that the joining node needs to catch up on when rejoining the cluster is dictated by:

1. The duration the node was not present in the cluster
…

In this blog post, we’ll discuss trackable flow control in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Introduction

Percona XtraDB Cluster has a self-regulating mechanism called Flow Control. This mechanism helps to avoid a situation wherein the weakest/slowest member of the cluster falls significantly behind other members of the cluster.

When a member of a cluster is slow at applying write-sets (while simultaneously continuing to receive write-sets from the cluster group channel), then the incoming/receive queue grows in size. If this queue crosses a set threshold (gcs.fc_limit), the node emits a FLOW_CONTROL message asking other members to slow down or halt processing.

While …

In this blog post, we’ll look at the actions and efforts Percona experts took to scale Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Introduction

When we first started analyzing Percona XtraDB Cluster performance, it was pretty bad. We would see contention even with 16 threads. Performance was even worse with sync binlog=1, although the same pattern was observed even with the binary log disabled. The effect was not only limited to OLTP workloads, as even other workloads (like update-key/non-key) were also affected in a wider sense than OLTP.

That’s when we started analyzing the contention issues and found multiple problems. We will discuss all these problems and the solutions we adapted. But …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20-3 on April 13, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6.35-26.20-3 is now the current release, based on the following:

• Percona Server 5.6.35-81.0
• Galera Replication library 3.20
• wsrep API version 26

All Percona software is open-source and free.

…

In our latest release of Percona XtraDB Cluster, we’ve introduced major performance improvements to the MySQLwrite-set replication layer. In this post, we want to show what these improvements look like.

For the test, we used the sysbench OLTP_RW, UPDATE_KEY and UPDATE_NOKEY workloads with 100 tables, 4mln rows each, which gives about 100GB of datasize. In all the tests we use a three-node setup, connected via a 10GB network, with the sysbench load directed to the one primary node.

In the first chart, we show improvements comparing to the previous version (5.7.16):

The main improvements come from concurrent workloads, under multiple threads.

The …

Percona announces the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-29.20 on April 19, 2017. Binaries are available from the downloads section or our software repositories.

NOTE: You can also run Docker containers from the images in the Docker Hub repository.

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.17-29.20 is now the current release, based on the following:

• …