In this blog post, I want to share a case we worked on a few days ago. I’ll show you how we approached the resolution of a MySQL performance issue and used Percona Monitoring and Management PMM to support troubleshooting. The customer had noticed a linear high CPU usage in one of their MySQL instances and was not able to figure out why as there was no much traffic hitting the app. We needed to reduce the high CPU usage on MySQL. The server is a small instance:

Models | 6xIntel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 0 @ 2.20GHz
10GB RAM

This symptom can be caused by various different reasons. Let’s see how PMM can be used to troubleshoot the issue.

CPU

It’s important to understand where the CPU time is being consumed: user space, system space, iowait, and so on. Here we can see that CPU usage was …

EverSQL is a platform that intelligently tunes your SQL queries by providing query optimization recommendations, and feedback on missing indexes. This is the second post of our EverSQL series, if you missed our introductory post take a look there first and then come back to this article.

We’ll use the Stackoverflow data set again as we did in our first post.

Diving into query optimization

We’ll grab the worst performing query in the list from PMM and optimize it. This query builds a list of the top 50 most recent posts which have a score greater than two, and involves joining two large tables – posts and comments. The original runtime of that query is …

A common challenge with continuously deployed applications is that new and modified SQL queries are constantly being introduced to the application. Many companies choose to use a database monitoring system (such as PMM) to identify those slow queries. But identifying slow queries is only the start – what about actually optimizing them?

In this post we’ll demonstrate a new way to both identify and optimize slow queries, by utilizing the recent integration of Percona Monitoring and Management with EverSQL Query Optimizer via Chrome browser extension. This integration allows you to identify slow queries using PMM, and optimize them automatically using EverSQL Query Optimizer.

Optimizing queries with PMM & EverSQL

We’re using PMM to monitor our MySQL …

In this blog post, I’ll look at whether optimizing indexing is always the key to improving MySQL query performance (spoiler, it isn’t).

As we look at MySQL query performance, our first concern is often whether a query is using the right indexes to retrieve the data. This is based on the assumption that finding the data is the most expensive operation – and the one you should focus on for MySQL query optimization. However, this is not always the case.

Let’s look at this query for illustration:

mysql> show create table tbl G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
      Table: tbl
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `tbl` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `k` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
 `g` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
 KEY `k_1` (`k`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB …