Monthly Archives: March 2013

Open Stack Ops Guide

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Ted Neykov, currently a hacker at Rackspace, pointed me in the direction of the new Open Stack Operations Guide. I have only had a chance to browse the .pdf at this point, however I believe this will end up being a very informative and useful book for me going forward.

Taken from the guide’s summery:

‘This book offers hard-earned experience from OpenStack operators who have run OpenStack in production for six months or longer.  They’ve gathered their notes, shared their stories, and learned from each other in the room. We invite you to join in the quest for best practices in OpenStack cloud operations’

Here is a quick video that was released along with the guide, that briefly describes the process they used during it’s creation:

ZFS Day videos

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The folks over at ZFS Day 2012 have posted a nice and wide ranging series of videos from last years event.

Taken from the description of the event:

‘The first ever ZFS conference covered all aspects of using ZFS in production. You can find ZFS in the most demanding environments, from video servers to cloud platforms to databases to NFS servers to HPC. Come learn about what makes ZFS a great storage system for these and other applications.’

Of particular interest to me (because of our desire to run zfs on Linux in production environments (zfsonlinux.org)) are the following two videos:

ZFS for Linux Implementation – Brian Behlendorf:

Panel: The State of ZFS on various os versions:

You can find a complete list of videos, talks and slides here.

Maatkit is now Percona Toolkit for MySQL

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I have written about Maatkit in the past, and more specifically how to use ‘mk-query-digest’.   Development on Maatkit has stopped at this point and you should look to use the Percona Toolkit for Mysql going forward.

We use ‘pt-query-digest’ on a regular basis on our servers in order to profile running Mysql instances during periods of high load and at times when general query profiling is required.  It appears as though there have been some changes to way in which the script works during the transition from ‘mk-query-digest’ to ‘pt-query-profiler’

In order to use it at this point you should use the following example syntax:

# pt-query-digest –user user_name –password pass_word –processlist localhost –interval 0.01 –run-time 10m

You will also notice that there is a new command line paramater ‘–run-time’ that is used to determine how long you would like the profiler to run before producing a report, in this case I would like to run the profiler for 10 minutes.

The output is also slightly different in that the summery report that was normally printed out at the end of the report has been moved toward the beginning of the report as well.

InnoDB Quick Reference Guide

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We are currently in the process of upgrading our mysql 5.1 instances to mysql 5.6 , because of this, we are once again very focused on overall mysql performance, and more specifically on Innodb performance going forward.

Matt Reid recently published a book entitled ‘InnoDB Quick Reference Guide.’

I believe that this book will come in very handy to us over the next few weeks and months, as we once again look to delve into mysql behavior and Innodb internals.

I have downloaded a copy of this e-book and I will be providing a more in-depth review shortly.

UPDATE:

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Innodb
This chapter talks about the features of the Innodb storage engine, as well as it’s requiremnets, suported platforms, etc. The chapter does a good job of providing a clear overview of Innodb and it’s overall features and use cases.

Chapter 2: Basic Configuration Parameters
This chapter talks about various configuration varables and how they realate to and effect Innodb. The chapter helps provide you with a better understanding of some of the more basic Innodb configuration options and how the effect Innodb.

Chapter 3: Advanced Configuration Parameters
This chapter provides a much more in-dpeth look at some of the more advanced configuraion variables used to control the behavior of Innodb and how they relate it’s overall performance. The chapter does a great job of covering all the necessary Innodb related parameters that really effect how Innodb performs under real world workloads.

Chapter 4: Load Testing InnoDB for Performance
This chapter focuses on the numerous open-source tools that can be used to test the performance of both the application (Mysql) and the OS (filesystem, etc). All the major tools are covered here and the chapter does a good job of covering each of the tools and their use cases.

Chapter 5: Maintenance and Monitoring
This section discuss some typical maintence tasks that are associated with running Innodb. Other information includes some common methods for finding and pulling runtime information and performance information from the storage engine.

Chapter 6: Troubleshooting InnoDB
This chapter provides some good insite into several of the more common issues that you could face if you have an Innodb deployment, from crash recovery to issues regarding backup and recovery.

Chapter 7: References and links
A small section that you can use to find further detail about Innodb and Mysql.

Overall:
This book does a good job of covering the main features, paramaters, and use cases for the Mysql InnodDB storage engine.