MySQL Server generates several logs that can help you monitor the activities of the server. However, once these logs are enabled, they can grow in size and start taking up too much disk space. This is why it’s important to have an automated way of archiving and preserving MySQL log files for a certain duration, as well as deleting the old ones. In this blog post, we describe some best practices for setting up and managing MySQL error logs, general logs and slow query logs for your MySQL deployments.

Setting Up MySQL Server Logging

Let’s look at how to setup the following 3 types of logs:

Error Log

Logs all the problems encountered during starting, running, or stopping mysqld. This log can be enabled by having the following option in /etc/my.cnf file:

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Sometimes, it is required to enable the general query log (which is disabled by default). If the general query log is enabled the server writes to this log information when clients connect or disconnect, and each SQL statement received from the client.

The question is, does enabling the general query log affects the MySQL performance ?
Also, it is possible to record the output of this log into either file or table in the mysql database (mysql.general_log), what is the performance impact of each one?

Let's do some simple benchmark for those scenarios to measure the actual impact on the mysql performance.

System Information:

HW configurations:

• CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3520M Processor (4M Cache, up to 3.60 GHz).
  • 2 cores, 4 threads, HT enabled.
  …

This guide will get you up and running with how to identify the bottleneck queries using the excellent tool pt-query-digest. You will learn how to use and analyze the output returned by pt-query-digest. You will also learn some differences between slow query logging in various MySQL versions. Later on in the post I will also show you how to make use of the extra diagnostic data available with Percona Server.

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