Ronald Bradford
MySQL Expert

MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford shares valuable input in MySQL Performance Tuning, MySQL Scalability and general MySQL Help from his two decades of working with MySQL, Oracle, Ingres and development technologies.

Have you checked your MySQL error log today?

As a consultant I would be rich if I made money every time when asking “Have you checked the MySQL error log?”

Today’s special found in a 13GB MySQL server error log.

090819 22:49:37InnoDB: Warning: difficult to find free blocks from
InnoDB: the buffer pool (1101071 search iterations)! Consider
InnoDB: increasing the buffer pool size.
InnoDB: It is also possible that in your Unix version
InnoDB: fsync is very slow, or completely frozen inside
InnoDB: the OS kernel. Then upgrading to a newer version
InnoDB: of your operating system may help. Look at the
InnoDB: number of fsyncs in diagnostic info below.
InnoDB: Pending flushes (fsync) log: 0; buffer pool: 0
InnoDB: 167 OS file reads, 1 OS file writes, 1 OS fsyncs
InnoDB: Starting InnoDB Monitor to print further
InnoDB: diagnostics to the standard output.
090819 22:49:37InnoDB: Warning: difficult to find free blocks from
InnoDB: the buffer pool (1101051 search iterations)! Consider
InnoDB: increasing the buffer pool size.
InnoDB: It is also possible that in your Unix version
InnoDB: fsync is very slow, or completely frozen inside
InnoDB: the OS kernel. Then upgrading to a newer version
InnoDB: of your operating system may help. Look at the
InnoDB: number of fsyncs in diagnostic info below.
InnoDB: Pending flushes (fsync) log: 0; buffer pool: 0
InnoDB: 167 OS file reads, 1 OS file writes, 1 OS fsyncs
InnoDB: Starting InnoDB Monitor to print further
InnoDB: diagnostics to the standard output.
090819 22:49:37InnoDB: Warning: difficult to find free blocks from
InnoDB: the buffer pool (1101072 search iterations)! Consider
InnoDB: increasing the buffer pool size.
InnoDB: It is also possible that in your Unix version
InnoDB: fsync is very slow, or completely frozen inside
InnoDB: the OS kernel. Then upgrading to a newer version
InnoDB: of your operating system may help. Look at the
InnoDB: number of fsyncs in diagnostic info below.
InnoDB: Pending flushes (fsync) log: 0; buffer pool: 0
InnoDB: 167 OS file reads, 1 OS file writes, 1 OS fsyncs
InnoDB: Starting InnoDB Monitor to print further
InnoDB: diagnostics to the standard output.

As you can see the same error is occuring, and in this example 3 times in the last second. To find the cause of the error I didn’t have to look far because I had already checked the /etc/my.cnf file.

$ cat /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
set-variable = max_connections=500
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 500
safe-show-database

Where do people come up with these my.cnf files? A decision was made to create one, and not use either no file or at least the default that was provided with the installation that is still on the system.

$ find / -name *my*cnf
/home/dontcold/.my.cnf
/etc/my.cnf
/root/.my.cnf
/usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/my.cnf
/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.0.77/my-small.cnf
/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.0.77/my-medium.cnf
/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.0.77/my-innodb-heavy-4G.cnf
/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.0.77/my-large.cnf
/usr/share/doc/MySQL-server-5.0.77/my-huge.cnf
/usr/share/mysql/my-small.cnf
/usr/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf
/usr/share/mysql/my-innodb-heavy-4G.cnf
/usr/share/mysql/my-large.cnf
/usr/share/mysql/my-huge.cnf

What is interesting is that I’ve seen nearly the same file on a previous installation and I documented in For MySQL DBA fame and glory. Prize included.

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2 Responses to “Have you checked your MySQL error log today?”

  1. Keith Murphy says:

    Silly yes, but it keeps us in business so it’s not a bad thing eh?

    keith

  2. Ray Causey says:

    The /usr/share/… cnf files must be part of the install. My server has them as well and I did not create them. They also all have the same create date.

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