MySQL - Tuning Server Parameters

You can get the default buffer sizes used by the mysqld server with this command:

shell> mysqld --help

This command produces a list of all mysqld options and configurable variables. The output includes the default values and looks something like this:

Possible variables for option --set-variable (-O) are:

back_log current value: 5

bdb_cache_size current value: 1048540

binlog_cache_size current_value: 32768

connect_timeout current value: 5

delayed_insert_timeout current value: 300

delayed_insert_limit current value: 100

delayed_queue_size current value: 1000

flush_time current value: 0

interactive_timeout current value: 28800

join_buffer_size current value: 131072

key_buffer_size current value: 1048540

lower_case_table_names current value: 0

long_query_time current value: 10

max_allowed_packet current value: 1048576

max_binlog_cache_size current_value: 4294967295

max_connections current value: 100

max_connect_errors current value: 10

max_delayed_threads current value: 20

max_heap_table_size current value: 16777216

max_join_size current value: 4294967295

max_sort_length current value: 1024

max_tmp_tables current value: 32

max_write_lock_count current value: 4294967295

myisam_sort_buffer_size current value: 8388608

net_buffer_length current value: 16384

net_retry_count current value: 10

net_read_timeout current value: 30

net_write_timeout current value: 60

query_buffer_size current value: 0

record_buffer current value: 131072

slow_launch_time current value: 2

sort_buffer current value: 2097116

table_cache current value: 64

thread_concurrency current value: 10

tmp_table_size current value: 1048576

thread_stack current value: 131072

wait_timeout current value: 28800

If there is a mysqld server currently running, you can see what values it actually is using for the variables by executing this command:

shell> mysqladmin variables

You can find a full description for all variables in the SHOW VARIABLES section in this manual.

You can also see some statistics from a running server by issuing the command SHOW STATUS.

MySQL uses algorithms that are very scalable, so you can usually run with very little memory. If you, however, give MySQL more memory, you will normally also get better performance.

When tuning a MySQL server, the two most important variables to use are key_buffer_size and table_cache. You should first feel confident that you have these right before trying to change any of the other variables.

If you have much memory (>=256M) and many tables and want maximum performance with a moderate number of clients, you should use something like this:

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=64M -O table_cache=256 \

-O sort_buffer=4M -O record_buffer=1M &

If you have only 128M and only a few tables, but you still do a lot of sorting, you can use something like:

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=16M -O sort_buffer=1M

If you have little memory and lots of connections, use something like this:

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=512k -O sort_buffer=100k \

-O record_buffer=100k &

or even:

shell> safe_mysqld -O key_buffer=512k -O sort_buffer=16k \

-O table_cache=32 -O record_buffer=8k -O net_buffer=1K &

When you have installed MySQL, the `support-files' directory will contain some different my.cnf example files, `my-huge.cnf', `my-large.cnf', `my-medium.cnf', and `my-small.cnf', you can use as a base to optimize your system.

If there are very many connections, ``swapping problems'' may occur unless mysqld has been configured to use very little memory for each connection. mysqld performs better if you have enough memory for all connections, of course.

Note that if you change an option to mysqld, it remains in effect only for that instance of the server.

To see the effects of a parameter change, do something like this:

shell> mysqld -O key_buffer=32m --help

Make sure that the --help option is last; otherwise, the effect of any options listed after it on the command line will not be reflected in the output.

How MySQL Opens and Closes Tables ?

table_cache, max_connections, and max_tmp_tables affect the maximum number of files the server keeps open. If you increase one or both of these values, you may run up against a limit imposed by your operating system on the per-process number of open file descriptors. However, you can increase the limit on many systems. Consult your OS documentation to find out how to do this, because the method for changing the limit varies widely from system to system.

table_cache is related to max_connections. For example, for 200 concurrent running connections, you should have a table cache of at least 200 * n, where n is the maximum number of tables in a join.

The cache of open tables can grow to a maximum of table_cache (default 64; this can be changed with the -O table_cache=# option to mysqld). A table is never closed, except when the cache is full and another thread tries to open a table or if you use mysqladmin refresh or mysqladmin flush-tables.

When the table cache fills up, the server uses the following procedure to locate a cache entry to use:

Tables that are not currently in use are released, in least-recently-used order.

If the cache is full and no tables can be released, but a new table needs to be opened, the cache is temporarily extended as necessary.

If the cache is in a temporarily-extended state and a table goes from in-use to not-in-use state, the table is closed and released from the cache.

A table is opened for each concurrent access. This means that if you have two threads accessing the same table or access the table twice in the same query (with AS) the table needs to be opened twice. The first open of any table takes two file descriptors; each additional use of the table takes only one file descriptor. The extra descriptor for the first open is used for the index file; this descriptor is shared among all threads.

You can check if your table cache is too small by checking the mysqld variable opened_tables. If this is quite big, even if you haven't done a lot of FLUSH TABLES, you should increase your table cache.

MySQL - Drawbacks to Creating Large Numbers of Tables in the Same Database

If you have many files in a directory, open, close, and create operations will be slow. If you execute SELECT statements on many different tables, there will be a little overhead when the table cache is full, because for every table that has to be opened, another must be closed. You can reduce this overhead by making the table cache larger.

MySQL - Why So Many Open tables?

When you run mysqladmin status, you'll see something like this:

Uptime: 426 Running threads: 1 Questions: 11082 Reloads: 1 Open tables: 12

This can be somewhat perplexing if you only have 6 tables.

MySQL is multithreaded, so it may have many queries on the same table simultaneously. To minimize the problem with two threads having different states on the same file, the table is opened independently by each concurrent thread. This takes some memory and one extra file descriptor for the data file. The index file descriptor is shared between all threads.

How MySQL Uses Memory ?

The list below indicates some of the ways that the mysqld server uses memory. Where applicable, the name of the server variable relevant to the memory use is given:

The key buffer (variable key_buffer_size) is shared by all threads; Other buffers used by the server are allocated as needed.

Each connection uses some thread-specific space: A stack (default 64K, variable thread_stack), a connection buffer (variable net_buffer_length), and a result buffer (variable net_buffer_length). The connection buffer and result buffer are dynamically enlarged up to max_allowed_packet when needed. When a query is running, a copy of the current query string is also allocated.

All threads share the same base memory.

Only the compressed ISAM / MyISAM tables are memory mapped. This is because the 32-bit memory space of 4GB is not large enough for most big tables. When systems with a 64-bit address space become more common we may add general support for memory mapping.

Each request doing a sequential scan over a table allocates a read buffer (variable record_buffer).

All joins are done in one pass, and most joins can be done without even using a temporary table. Most temporary tables are memory-based (HEAP) tables. Temporary tables with a big record length (calculated as the sum of all column lengths) or that contain BLOB columns are stored on disk. One problem in MySQL versions before Version 3.23.2 is that if a HEAP table exceeds the size of tmp_table_size, you get the error The table tbl_name is full. In newer versions this is handled by automatically changing the in-memory (HEAP) table to a disk-based (MyISAM) table as necessary. To work around this problem, you can increase the temporary table size by setting the tmp_table_size option to mysqld, or by setting the SQL option SQL_BIG_TABLES in the client program.

In MySQL Version 3.20, the maximum size of the temporary table was record_buffer*16, so if you are using this version, you have to increase the value of record_buffer. You can also start mysqld with the --big-tables option to always store temporary tables on disk. However, this will affect the speed of many complicated queries.

Most requests doing a sort allocates a sort buffer and 0-2 temporary files depending on the result set size.

Almost all parsing and calculating is done in a local memory store. No memory overhead is needed for small items and the normal slow memory allocation and freeing is avoided. Memory is allocated only for unexpectedly large strings (this is done with malloc() and free()).

Each index file is opened once and the data file is opened once for each concurrently running thread. For each concurrent thread, a table structure, column structures for each column, and a buffer of size 3 * n is allocated (where n is the maximum row length, not counting BLOB columns). A BLOB uses 5 to 8 bytes plus the length of the BLOB data. The ISAM/MyISAM table handlers will use one extra row buffer for internal usage.

For each table having BLOB columns, a buffer is enlarged dynamically to read in larger BLOB values. If you scan a table, a buffer as large as the largest BLOB value is allocated.

Table handlers for all in-use tables are saved in a cache and managed as a FIFO. Normally the cache has 64 entries. If a table has been used by two running threads at the same time, the cache contains two entries for the table.

A mysqladmin flush-tables command closes all tables that are not in use and marks all in-use tables to be closed when the currently executing thread finishes. This will effectively free most in-use memory. ps and other system status programs may report that mysqld uses a lot of memory. This may be caused by thread-stacks on different memory addresses. For example, the Solaris version of ps counts the unused memory between stacks as used memory. You can verify this by checking available swap with swap -s. We have tested mysqld with commercial memory-leakage detectors, so there should be no memory leaks.

How MySQL Locks Tables ?

You can find a discussion about different locking methods in the appendix.

All locking in MySQL is deadlock-free. This is managed by always requesting all needed locks at once at the beginning of a query and always locking the tables in the same order.

The locking method MySQL uses for WRITE locks works as follows:

If there are no locks on the table, put a write lock on it. Otherwise, put the lock request in the write lock queue. The locking method MySQL uses for READ locks works as follows:

If there are no write locks on the table, put a read lock on it. Otherwise, put the lock request in the read lock queue. When a lock is released, the lock is made available to the threads in the write lock queue, then to the threads in the read lock queue.

This means that if you have many updates on a table, SELECT statements will wait until there are no more updates.

To work around this for the case where you want to do many INSERT and SELECT operations on a table, you can insert rows in a temporary table and update the real table with the records from the temporary table once in a while.

This can be done with the following code:

mysql> LOCK TABLES real_table WRITE, insert_table WRITE;

mysql> insert into real_table select * from insert_table;

mysql> TRUNCATE TABLE insert_table;

mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;

You can use the LOW_PRIORITY options with INSERT if you want to prioritize retrieval in some specific cases.

You could also change the locking code in `mysys/thr_lock.c' to use a single queue. In this case, write locks and read locks would have the same priority, which might help some applications.