In a MySQL hosting replication setup, the parameter Seconds_Behind_Master (SBM), as displayed by the SHOW SLAVE STATUS command, is commonly used as an indication of the current replication lag of the slave. In this blog post, we examine how to understand and interpret this value in various situations.

Possible Values of  Seconds Behind Master

The value of SBM, as explained in the  MySQL documentation, depends on the state of the MySQL slave in general, and the states of MySQL slave SQL_THREAD and IO_THREAD in particular. While IO_THREAD connects with the master and reads the updates, SQL_THREAD applies these updates on the slave. Let’s examine the possible values of SBM during different states of the MySQL Slave.

When SBM Value is Null

• SBM is …

This post discuss the pt-table-checksum & error "Waiting to check replicas for differences: 0% 00:00 remain" with a use-case and solution.

The post pt-table-checksum & Waiting to check replicas for differences: 0% 00:00 remain first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

MySQL 5.6.23 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here.

For this release, there is 1 “Security Note”, 3 “Functionality Changed”, and 5 “Compilation Notes”, all benign, but let me address them:

1. Security Note: The linked OpenSSL library for the MySQL Commercial Server has been updated from version 1.0.1j to version 1.0.1k. Issues fixed in the new version are described at http://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html.
2. Functionality Changed: Support for the SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 protocols has been disabled because they provide weak encryption. (Bug #19820550, Bug #19921150)
3. Functionality Changed: yaSSL was upgraded to version …

Recently I was working with a customer where we noticed that Seconds_Behind_Master fluctuating from an expected value of 0 seconds behind to a fairly high six figure value.  The servers were configured in a master-master relationship and used 5 figure server_id values, and we had just migrated this cluster from one data centre to another by re-pointing masters.  Seeing large fluctuations in Seconds_Behind_Master can often be explained by long running queries being processed by the SQL_THREAD, however SHOW PROCESSLIST indicated that there were no long running replication events, and we had no other indication that the server was lagging  due to resource constraints — CPU, disk, and memory were under-utilized.

We then moved our investigation to manual review of the binary log where events appeared normal (5 digit server_id values) until every once in a while we would see a rash of server_id 21 events.. Wait, what?  I …