2014-03-10

Have you rebooted your PC?


Last week we had two terrible days in the Data Warehouse, for no obvious reasons at all the database server slow down to almost a standstill, like someone had thrown glue in the server. I was on a business trip and could not attend the problem from start.
First I suspected the network interfaces since we have a known problem with one of the interfaces but that was a red herring. Then I was looking at the memory unilization, I could not see anything alarming. (I find interpreting memory utilization in Linux a bit of a challenge.) I could not see any sign of excessive paging or swapping, I was looking at vmstat swap but si and so was most of the time zero. I noticed free memory was very low but I do not know what is useful and not harmful use of memory (as cache) in Linux, and I do not know what these figures looks like when the system is ok.
Anyway the server behaved very bad, MySQL actually crashed twice during the time. I stopped all unnecessary processes in the server, checked network cables but all in vain. Later I remember the remedy for all problems when you sit in a help desk. ‘Is the power cord attached?,   ‘Is the network cable connected?’’ and lastly the classic  ‘Have you rebooted your PC?
I had already checked the power and network cables, but I had not rebooted the server. And sure enough after restart all was back to normal. But I still do not understand what the root cause of the problem was and that is very unsatisfactory. But as I use to say - Once is no time, twice is one time too many  -  next time, which God forbid, this happens I should be better prepared, or at least reboot quicker.



While this malady was ongoing I noticed MySQL queries was in state statistics or something similar, which I interpreted as MySQL where optimizing access paths. We only run dynamic queries since we very seldom run the same query more than once in the same context, but there are some programs that run the same query over and over again, maybe we could gain something by prepare the query and then execute the query. This is a reworked prepare query program:


Sadly it only performs on par with the original dynamic query program  (which runs a mysqli->query command). It was a good try though.

No comments:

Post a Comment