InnoDB keeps hot data in memory on its buffer named InnoDB Buffer Pool. For a long time, when a MySQL instance needed to bounce, this hot cached data was lost and the instance required a warm-up period to perform as well as it did before the service restart.

That is not the case anymore. Newer versions of MySQL/MariaDB allow users to save the state of this buffer by dumping tablespace ID’s and page ID’s to a file on disk that will be loaded automatically on startup, making the newly started server buffer pool as it was prior the restart.

Details about the MySQL implementation can be found at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/innodb-preload-buffer-pool.html

With that in mind, Percona XtraBackup versions …

In this post I would like to review how my dumper for MySQL works from the point of view of locks. Since 0.6 serie we have different options, so I will try to explain how they work

As you may know mydumper is multithreaded and this adds a lot of complexity compared with other logical backup tools as it also needs to coordinate all threads with the same snapshot to be consistent. So let review how mydumper does this with the default settings.

By default mydumper uses 4 threads to dump data and 1 main thread

Main Thread

• FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK

Dump Thread X

• START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT;
• dump non-InnoDB tables

Main Thread

• UNLOCK TABLES

Dump Thread X

• dump InnoDB tables

As you can see in this case we need FTWRL for two things, coordinate transaction’s snapshots …