This document summarizes James Kreuziger's presentation on optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server. The presentation covered choosing a MySQL version and configuration, testing tools, and the results of testing different MySQL configurations and key block sizes on storage space usage and load performance. It was aimed at Cascade administrators and provided an overview of topics like hardware requirements, the InnoDB buffer pool, and recommended resources for MySQL configuration and optimization.

1. Optimizing MySQL for
Cascade Server
James Kreuziger
Strategic Communications
@jkreuzig
#csuc14
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2. The standard “a little bit about myself”
• Graduate of UC Irvine (96) with a B.S. in Physics
• Staff member for the last 16 years
• First 8 years as a scientific programmer on grant funded research
• Last 8 years in communications department building websites
• Hobbies
– Soccer referee
• USSF Grade 6 State Referee
• AYSO National Referee
• Southern California Soccer Officials Association (High School Soccer)
• NISOA Referee (National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association)
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3. Overview
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
• Tools for testing
• Testing and results
• Questions
• Resources
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4. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
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5. Who is this presentation for?
On a daily basis, I wear many hats:
• Cascade administrator
• Database administrator
• System administrator
• Apache administrator
• Google Search Appliance
• And the catch all:
OTHER DUTIES AS ASSIGNED
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6. Who is this presentation for?
You should be here if:
• Cascade administrators
• Want to migrate from another db
• You have installed MySQL for
other reasons, but haven’t done
any other configuration.
Not really for:
• Large MySQL installation dba’s
• You are running MySQL in the
cloud
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7. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
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8. What we won’t cover today
• Configuration of Cascade Server
• MySQL replication or cluster setups
• Memcached
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9. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
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10. Terminology
Query Cache – From the MySQL Documentation[1]
“The query cache stores the text of a SELECT statement together with the
corresponding result that was sent to the client. If an identical statement is
received later, the server retrieves the results from the query cache rather than
parsing and executing the statement again. The query cache is shared among
sessions, so a result set generated by one client can be sent in response to the
same query issued by another client.”
The key here is “identical statement”. Every space, term
and even the capitalization of the statement has to be the
same.
1. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/query-cache.html 10

11. Terminology cont.
Innodb Buffer Pool – From the MySQL Documentation[2]
“InnoDB maintains a storage area called the buffer pool for caching data and
indexes in memory”
VERY important. Probably one of the most important
configuration options. If you make only one change to your
configuration, this (in my opinion) is the most important.
2. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-buffer-pool.html 11

12. Terminology cont.
Row – An entry in a database table
Page - The default size at which data is moved between disk and memory
(default = 16K for MySQL)[3]. It’s the smallest unit of on disk storage.
– In MySQL, the max a row can be is roughly 50% of the page size (8000 bytes default) not
including VARBINAY, VARCHAR, BOLOB or TEXT columns.
Why is the max row size restricted to 50% of the page size?
– To allow one page to store at least 2 columns.
3. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/glossary.html#glos_page 12

13. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
13

14. Hardware requirements
Hannon Hill requirements for running MySQL for Cascade[4]
• MySQL 5.0 / 5.1 / 5.5
• Memory for database server:
– 2 GB RAM (minimum)
– 4 GB RAM (recommended)
I’d recommend a quad-core server with a minimum 16 GB
RAM for your database server.
4. http://www.hannonhill.com/products/requirements.html 14

15. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
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16. Which version of MySQL to run
• 5.0
• 5.1
• 5.5
• 5.6? Not yet officially supported
4. http://www.hannonhill.com/products/requirements.html 16

17. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
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18. Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Oracle MySQL
• MariaDB
– Soon to be the default database server for RedHat and by default, CentOS
– http://ideas.hannonhill.com/forums/52559-ideas-for-cascade-server/suggestions/
6065138-add-support-for-mariadb
• Percona Server
– My favorite
– Percona XtraDB is a drop in replacement for innodb[5]
– XtraDB available in MariaDB as well.
Note: Only Oracle MySQL is listed as currently supported. Try these
others at your own risk.
5. http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb 18

19. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
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20. Default MySQL configuration
These are the Hannon Hill recommendations[6]
• InnoDB storage engine
• max_allowed_packet=16M
• key_buffer=16M
• Character set is defined when creating the database
6. http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/Database-Config/ 20

21. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
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22. Configuring MySQL for your workload
The my.cnf file
Innodb should be the default storage engine
• innodb_file_per_table = 1
• log_bin = <directory where binary log files live>
• Cache (query caches and other caches)
– binlog_cache_size
– thread_cache_size
– query_cache_size
– query_cache_limit
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23. Configuring MySQL for your workload
cont.
• Buffers
– innodb_buffer_pool - VERY important. Probably one of the most
important configuration options. The bigger you can make this,
the better. 80% of available memory is a good starting point. If
you have 128 GB+ memory available on your machine, you may
even be able to push it higher (90%)
You can make this too big. If your entire dataset can fit into
the inoodb_buffer_pool, it’s probably too big.
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24. Configuring MySQL for your workload
cont.
• Storage
– If you have the option, store your data and binary log files on
separate physical disks
“But I don’t want to read all the documentation. I just want
to get started with a good, solid configuration file that
meets my needs.”
• Percona configuration tool – https://tools.percona.com/
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25. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
• Tools for testing
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26. Tools for testing
• Hardware monitoring – Vmware vSphere web client
– If you have the option, store your data and binary log files on
separate physical disks
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27. Tools for testing cont.
• Monitoring MySQL
– MySQL Workbench - http://mysqlworkbench.org/
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28. Tools for testing cont.
• jmeter – Open Source load testing tool written in java
- http://jmeter.apache.org/
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29. Tools for testing cont.
• Blazemeter – jmeter in the cloud.
• http://blazemeter.com
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30. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
• Tools for testing
• Testing and results
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31. Testing and results
• Test hardware setup – cmstest.oit.uci.edu
– Vmware vcenter server
– Intel® "Penryn" Generation, 4 CPU
– CentOS 6 (64-bit)
– 8GB RAM
– 512GB Storage
• Cascade Setup
– Cascade 7.12
– Java options
• export JAVA_OPTS="-d64 -server –Xmx4096M -XX:MaxPermSize=512M
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32. Testing and results cont.
• MySQL Setup
– Default MySQL server configuration (Hannon Hill
recommendations)
• cascade-test-stripped.cnf
– My configuration
• cascade-my-test.cnf (most comments have been stripped out)
– Cascade database configuration options – Can be set at
database creation/restore, or using ALTER TABLE
• KEY_BLOCK_SIZE
– 16K
– 8K
– 4K
– 2K or 1K – Not tested. Not useful for a Cascade database instance. Row sizes
won’t compress.
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33. Testing and results cont.
• Storage testing
– Examine the file sizes of the .ibd (innodb) files. These are the
storage files for the data and indexes for each table. The size
shown in the OS corresponds to how much space each table is
taking.
– Could determine this through MySQL system tables, but results
would be comparable and it would take more time.
– Use ALTER TABLE to change all tables
• KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=16
• KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8
• KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4
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34. Testing and results cont.
• Storage testing results
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35. Testing and results cont.
• Load testing
– jmeter running on a 27” iMac, Quad Core, 32 GB RAM
• Allocated 10GB memory, otherwise it crashes
– Test plan - Cascade-Test.jmx
• 20 minute test
• 10 minute ramp up time
• 15 users
• Login, publishing (pages and directories), editing, opening, changing sites,
deleting messages, logoff
• Plan was to exercise Cascade with a typical number of active users (15)
and different MySQL configurations.
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36. Testing and results cont.
• Load testing results
– KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=16, 30 users
• Too many errors
– KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=16, 15 users
• 346.5 ms average. response time
– KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8, 15 users
• 339.5 ms average response time
– KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4, 15 users (single run)
• 331 ms average response time
– KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=16, 15 users, minimal configuration
• 389 ms average response time
Note: I didn’t test compression on the minimal configuration, as it
wasn’t enabled.
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37. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
• Tools for testing
• Testing and results
• Questions
37

38. Optimizing MySQL for Cascade Server
• Who is this presentation for?
• What we won’t cover today
• Terminology
• Hardware requirements
• Which version of MySQL to run
• Which flavor of MySQL to run
• Default MySQL configuration
• Configuring MySQL for your workload
• Tools for testing
• Testing and results
• Questions
• Resources
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39. Resources
• Book
– High Performance MySQL, 3rd Edition - Baron Schwartz, Peter
Zaitsev, and Vadim Tkachenko
– http://www.highperfmysql.com/
• Percona
– http://www.percona.com/
– Percona Tools https://tools.percona.com/
– YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/PerconaMySQL
• MariaDB
– https://mariadb.org/
• Oracle MySQL
– http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/ - Best overall
documentation
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40. Thank You!
James Kreuziger
jkreuzig@uci.edu
http://uci.edu/
@jkreuzig
#csuc14
949-824-5484
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