Transcending Technology Specific Boundaries

I had the pleasure to sit on the Performance Panel at the recent Percona Performance Conference. While the panel contained a number of usual MySQL suspects, one person was not familiar, that being Cary Millsap from Method R.

An expert in optimizing Oracle performance, Cary also gave an session on Day 2 that I attended. While he opened professing not to be an expert in MySQL, his talk provided valuable foundation knowledge irrespective of whether you use MySQL or another database product.

Having come myself from 7 straight years in system architecture and performance tuning in Ingres, then a further 6 years in Oracle again heavily involved in system architecture and performance tuning, a lot of my experience in the 10 years of providing my own MySQL consulting is drawn from my past RDBMS experiences. In addition much of what I actually provide to clients today is common sense that I don’t see applied.

A summary of the excellent content provided by Cary.

The common technology agnostic problem we need to address is:

  • Users say that everything is slow, but I don’t know where to begin
  • Users are complaining but all the monitoring dials are green

From a user’s perspective, their experience consist simply of two elements.

  1. Task
  2. Time

In general, business people simply don’t care about the “system” except thought the specific tasks that make up their pressing business needs. And for these users, performance is all about the time to complete this task.

Throughput can be stated as tasks per time.
Response time is the time taken per task.

Cary also quoted Donald Knuth — “The universal experience of programmers who have been using measurements tools has been that there intuitive guesses fail.”

Performance is easy if you stop guessing where your code is slow. A few best practice tips are:

  • You have to insist on seeing where time goes for any task you think is important
  • You need to look at the sequence diagram of the task
  • What individual part takes the most time, then look at the task before that. The fastest way to do something is don’t.
  • To drill down, you need to attack the skew of each part, not the average.

In Summary the closing points were:

  • Performance is about time and tasks
  • Not all tasks are created equal
  • Read “The Goal”
  • Don’t guess, your probably wrong
  • Measure response time before you optimize anything – Insist on it

Performance is easy when code measures it’s own time and tasks. This closing statement on instrumentation I completely concur with.

Percona Performance Conference Talk

My final presentation during the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo week was with the Percona Performance Conference on the topic of The Ideal Performance Architecture. My talk included discussions on Technology, Disk, Memory, Indexes, SQL and Data.

Updated 09/18/09
you can now see video of the event at Percona TV.

A Drizzle update – Running version 2009.03.970-development

I’ve not looked at compiling and running Drizzle on my server for the past four weeks. Well overdue time for a check and see how it’s going. I saw in today’s planet.mysql.com by Eric Day a new dependency is needed. libdrizzle 0.2.0 now in Drizzle is now required, so I started there.

cd ~/bzr
bzr branch lp:libdrizzle
cd libdrizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

No problems there, also documented at the Drizzle Wiki. Great to see the docs up to date. I see my old work on starting the compiling page still relevant. Tested on CentOS 5 and Mac OS/X 10.5

Compiling drizzle was not much more difficult.

cd ~/bzr/drizzle
bzr update
make distclean
./config/autorun.sh
./configure --prefix=/home/drizzle/deploy
make
make install

The problems happened when I started drizzle. Initially I was using bin/drizzled_safe, but it was recommended via IRC#drizzle I stick with sbin/drizzled

sbin/drizzled &
error while loading shared libraries: libprotobuf.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

An investigation of Google Proto Buffers.

$ protoc --version
libprotoc 2.0.2

I see that protobuf 2.0.3 is now available, but this was not the problem.

I got around the problem by specifying the current library path:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib sbin/drizzled &

I corrected this problem by adding /usr/local/lib to the default ld path, both the libdrizzle and libprotobuf libs are located there.

$ echo "/usr/local/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/drizzle.conf
$ ldconfig
$ ls -l /usr/local/lib
total 37240
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1194602 Mar 31 17:42 libdrizzle.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      940 Mar 31 17:42 libdrizzle.la
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       19 Mar 31 17:42 libdrizzle.so -> libdrizzle.so.0.0.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       19 Mar 31 17:42 libdrizzle.so.0 -> libdrizzle.so.0.0.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  1117979 Mar 31 17:42 libdrizzle.so.0.0.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12199302 Nov 30 23:32 libprotobuf.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      836 Nov 30 23:32 libprotobuf.la
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       20 Nov 30 23:32 libprotobuf.so -> libprotobuf.so.2.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       20 Aug 27  2008 libprotobuf.so.0 -> libprotobuf.so.0.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  5027949 Aug 27  2008 libprotobuf.so.0.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       20 Nov 30 23:32 libprotobuf.so.2 -> libprotobuf.so.2.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  5586965 Nov 30 23:32 libprotobuf.so.2.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  9264068 Nov 30 23:32 libprotoc.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      852 Nov 30 23:32 libprotoc.la
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       18 Nov 30 23:32 libprotoc.so -> libprotoc.so.0.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       18 Nov 30 23:32 libprotoc.so.0 -> libprotoc.so.0.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  3645396 Nov 30 23:32 libprotoc.so.0.0.0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root     4096 Mar 31 17:42 pkgconfig

Starting

$ sbin/drizzled &
InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins.
090331 18:38:08  InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match
InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles!
090331 18:38:08  InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files...
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer...
090331 18:38:08 InnoDB Plugin 1.0.3 started; log sequence number 46419
sbin/drizzled: ready for connections.
Version: '2009.03.970-development'  socket: ''  port: 4427  Source distribution

Verifying

$ bin/drizzle -uroot
Welcome to the Drizzle client..  Commands end with ; or g.
Your Drizzle connection id is 1
Server version: 2009.03.970-development Source distribution
Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.
drizzle> select version();
+-------------------------+
| version()               |
+-------------------------+
| 2009.03.970-development |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
drizzle> exit

Sweet! Now to try some testing & benchmarking before the barrage of conferences next month, 2009 MySQL Camp, Percona Performance Conference and MySQL Conference & Expo.

I’m going to check out The Juice Database Benchmark next as a more realistic benchmark to DBT2 and sysbench.