MySQL Community · I upgraded our production MySQL and hit these 11 landmines

21
Myr/mysql·posted by bob_chen·2 hours agoHelp

I upgraded our production MySQL and hit these 11 landmines

Some background first. Our setup is MySQL plus three downstream services, seven figures of daily requests, peaking around nine in the evening.

Worth noting: the official docs do cover this, just in a very inconspicuous spot. I only found it reading the source comments, where the author explains the reasoning — roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

Performance44%
Maintainability28%
Ecosystem and community17%
Hiring difficulty11%

36 votes total

13 comments

13 comments

M
Cchen_dev·3 minutes ago

Thanks for sharing real numbers — far more useful than the articles that only cover concepts.

181
Aalice_dev·12 minutes agoedited

Worth learning from this debugging approach. We went straight at the logs and took a much longer route.

171
Nnikic·2 hours ago

There is actually a simpler fix that needs no architecture change: move this check up to the gateway and the problem disappears. The cost is one extra lookup at the gateway.

159
Aalice_dev·1 hour ago

Sharing our numbers, 8 cores 16GB, same scenario:

| Concurrency | P50 | P99 |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | 12ms | 88ms |
| 500 | 31ms | 340ms |

P99 clearly collapses at 500 concurrency, which lines up with your knee point.

153
Aalice_dev·1 hour ago

Agreeing with the above. One addition: with this option enabled the GC count in your metrics doubles, so adjust the alert threshold at the same time or it will keep firing.

502
Wwinter·3 minutes ago

This is not a MySQL problem, it is a usage problem. The docs say this API is not thread-safe and you must lock around it yourself.

148
Sswoole_lee·5 hours ago

Has anyone run a controlled experiment? I did, reducing it to a single variable, and the difference was 4% — within noise. So I suspect the main cause is something else.

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Lli_mingMod·just now

One counter-example: below MySQL 7.4 the semantics of that code are different, so do not copy it verbatim. We got burned in staging and rolled back once.

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Bbob_chen·5 hours ago

Saved. I am reworking this area this week — this saves a lot of wrong turns.

15
Wwinter·1 hour ago

I see point 3 differently. The trade-off depends on your read/write ratio: read-heavy with little writing means caching actually widens the inconsistency window.

12
Lli_ming·5 hours ago

I just read the MySQL source — the author actually explains the reasoning in a comment, roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".

40
Nnikic·12 minutes ago

A question: what changes in a container with a 512Mi memory limit? That is how we run it in production.

4
Oops_wang·2 days ago

This matches what we see in production. We only hit it past 3k QPS; the earlier load tests showed nothing — the test traffic was too clean, with no long-tail requests.

4

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