Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

At AWS Re:Invent 2018 there were many great announcements of AWS New Services and New Features, but one basic feature that I’ve been waiting for years to be released is still nowhere to be  found.

AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is great and it’s got better through the years, adding different storage types and features like Provisioned IOPS. However, it still has the most basic inconvenient requirement – I have to decide in advance how much space I need to allocate, and pay for all of that allocated space whether I use it or not.

It would be so much better if AWS would allow true consumption model pricing with EBS, where you pay for the storage used, not the storage allocated. This is already the case for S3,  RDS, and even EC2 instances (with Unlimited Option on T2/T3 Instances), not to mention Serverless focused services.

For example, I would love to be able to create a 1TB EBS volume but only pay for 10GB of storage if I only use this amount of space.

Modern storage subsystems do a good job differentiating between the space available on the block device and what’s being used by user files and filesystem metadata. The space that’s not allocated any more can be TRIMmed. This is a basic requirement for working well on flash storage, and as modern EC2 instances already provision EBS storage as emulated NVMe devices, I would imagine Amazon could hook into such functionality to track space actually used.

For us at Percona this would make shipping applications on AWS Marketplace much more convenient. Right now for Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)  we have to choose how much space to allocate to the EBS volume by default, picking between it being expensive to run because of paying for the large unused EBS volume or setting a very limited by default capacity that needs user action to resize the EBS volume. Consumption-based EBS pricing would solve this dilemma.

This problem seems to be well recognized and understood. For example Pure Storage Cloud Block Storage (currently in Beta) is  expected to have such a feature.

I hope with its insane customer focus AWS will add this feature in the future, but currently we have to get by without it.

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Image: Arnold Reinhold [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Starting with PMM 1.13,  PMM uses Prometheus 2 for metrics storage, which tends to be heaviest resource consumer of CPU and RAM.  With Prometheus 2 Performance Improvements, PMM can scale to more than 1000 monitored nodes per instance in default configuration. In this blog post we will look into PMM scaling and capacity planning—how to estimate the resources required, and what drives resource consumption.

We have now tested PMM with up to 1000 nodes, using a virtualized system with 128GB of memory, 24 virtual cores, and SSD storage. We found PMM scales pretty linearly with the available memory and CPU cores, and we believe that a higher number of nodes could be supported with more powerful hardware.

What drives resource usage in PMM ?

Depending on your system configuration and workload, a single node can generate very different loads on the PMM server. The main factors that impact the performance of PMM are:

1. Number of samples (data points) injected into PMM per second
2. Number of distinct time series they belong to (cardinality)
3. Number of distinct query patterns your application uses
4. Number of queries you have on PMM, through the user interface on the API, and their complexity

These specifically can be impacted by:

• Software version – modern database software versions expose more metrics)
• Software configuration – some metrics are only exposed in certain configuration
• Workload – a large number of database objects and high concurrency will increase both the number of samples ingested and their cardinality.
• Exporter configuration – disabling collectors can reduce amount of data collectors
• Scrape frequency –  controlled by METRICS_RESOLUTION

All these factors together may impact resource requirements by a factor of ten or more, so do your own testing to be sure. However, the numbers in this article should serve as good general guidance as a start point for your research.

On the system supporting 1000 instances we observed the following performance:

As you can see, we have more than 2.000 scrapes/sec performed, providing almost two million samples/sec, and more than eight million active time series. These are the main numbers that define the load placed on Prometheus.

Capacity planning to scale PMM

Both CPU and memory are very important resources for PMM capacity planning. Memory is the more important as Prometheus 2 does not have good options for limiting memory consumption. If you do not have enough memory to handle your workload, then it will run out of memory and crash.

We recommend at least 2GB of memory for a production PMM Installation. A test installation with 1GB of memory is possible. However, it may not be able to monitor more than one or two nodes without running out of memory. With 2GB of memory you should be able to monitor at least five nodes without problem.

With powerful systems (8GB of more) you can have approximately eight systems per 1GB of memory, or about 15,000 samples ingested/sec per 1GB of memory.

To calculate the CPU usage resources required, allow for about 50 monitored systems per core (or 100K metrics/sec per CPU core).

One problem you’re likely to encounter if you’re running PMM with 100+ instances is the “Home Dashboard”. This becomes way too heavy with such a large number of servers. We plan to fix this issue in future releases of PMM, but for now you can work around it in two simple ways:

You can select the host, for example “pmm-server” in your home dashboard and save it, before adding a large amount of hosts to the system.

Or you can make some other dashboard of your choice and set it as the home dashboard.

Summary

• More than 1,000 monitored systems is possible per single PMM server
• Your specific workload and configuration may significantly change the resources required
• If deploying with 8GB or more, plan 50 systems per core, and eight systems per 1GB of RAM

The post Scaling Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

Is increasing GP2 volumes size or increasing IOPS for IO1 volumes a valid method for scaling IO-Bound workloads? In this post I’ll focus on one question: how much can we improve performance if we use faster cloud volumes? This post is a continuance of previous cloud research posts:

• Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud
• Percona XtraDB Cluster on Amazon GP2 Volumes

To recap, in Amazon EC2 we can use gp2 and io1 volumes. gp2 performance can be scaled with size, i.e for gp2 volume size of 500GB we get 1500 iops; size 1000GB – 3000 iops; and for 3334GB – 10000 iops (maximal possible value). For io1 volumes we can “buy” throughput up to 30000 iops.

So I wanted to check how both InnoDB and RocksDB storage engines perform on these volumes with different throughput.

Benchmark Scenario

I will use the same datasize that I used in Saving With MyRocks in The Cloud, that is sysbench-tpcc, 50 tables, 100W each, about 500GB datasize in InnoDB and 100GB in RocksDB (compressed with LZ4).

Volumes settings: gp2 volumes from 500GB (1000GB for InnoDB) to 3400GB with 100GB increments (so each increment increases throughput by 300 iops); io1 volumes: 1TB in size, iops from 1000 to 30000 with 1000 increments.

Let’s take look at the results. I will use a slightly different format than usual, but hopefully it represents the results better. You will see density throughout the plots—a higher and narrower chart represents less variance in the throughput. The plot represents the distribution of the throughput.

Results on GP2 volumes:

It’s quite interesting to see how the result scales with better IO throughput. InnoDB does not improve its throughput after gp2 size 2600GB, while MyRocks continues to scale linearly. The problem with MyRocks is that there is a lot of variance in throughput (I will show a one second resolution chart).

Results on IO1 volumes

Here MyRocks again shows an impressive growth as as we add more IO capacity, but also shows a lot of variance on high capacity volumes.

Let’s compare how engines perform with one second resolution. GP2 volume, 3400GB:

IO1 volume, 30000 iops:

So for MyRocks there seems to be periodical background activity, which does not allow it to achieve a stable throughput.

Raw results, if you’d like to review them, can be found here: https://github.com/Percona-Lab-results/201808-rocksdb-cloudio

Conclusions

If you are looking to improve throughput in IO-bound workloads, either increasing GP2 volumes size or increasing IOPS for IO1 volumes is a valid method, especially for the MyRocks engine.

The post Scaling IO-Bound Workloads for MySQL in the Cloud appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you likely know I like the ZFS filesystem a lot. ZFS has many very interesting features, but I am a bit tired of hearing negative statements on ZFS performance. It feels a bit like people are telling me “Why do you use InnoDB? I have read that MyISAM is faster.” I found the comparison of InnoDB vs. MyISAM quite interesting, and I’ll use it in this post.

To have some data to support my post, I started an AWS i3.large instance with a 1000GB gp2 EBS volume. A gp2 volume of this size is interesting because it is above the burst IOPS level, so it offers a constant 3000 IOPS performance level.

I used sysbench to create a table of 10M rows and then, using export/import tablespace, I copied it 329 times. I ended up with 330 tables for a total size of about 850GB. The dataset generated by sysbench is not very compressible, so I used lz4 compression in ZFS. For the other ZFS settings, I used what can be found in my earlier ZFS posts but with the ARC size limited to 1GB. I then used that plain configuration for the first benchmarks. Here are the results with the sysbench point-select benchmark, a uniform distribution and eight threads. The InnoDB buffer pool was set to 2.5GB.

In both cases, the load is IO bound. The disk is doing exactly the allowed 3000 IOPS. The above graph appears to be a clear demonstration that XFS is much faster than ZFS, right? But is that really the case? The way the dataset has been created is extremely favorable to XFS since there is absolutely no file fragmentation. Once you have all the files opened, a read IOP is just a single fseek call to an offset and ZFS doesn’t need to access any intermediate inode. The above result is about as fair as saying MyISAM is faster than InnoDB based only on table scan performance results of unfragmented tables and default configuration. ZFS is much less affected by the file level fragmentation, especially for point access type.

More on ZFS metadata

ZFS stores the files in B-trees in a very similar fashion as InnoDB stores data. To access a piece of data in a B-tree, you need to access the top level page (often called root node) and then one block per level down to a leaf-node containing the data. With no cache, to read something from a three levels B-tree thus requires 3 IOPS.

The extra IOPS performed by ZFS are needed to access those internal blocks in the B-trees of the files. These internal blocks are labeled as metadata. Essentially, in the above benchmark, the ARC is too small to contain all the internal blocks of the table files’ B-trees. If we continue the comparison with InnoDB, it would be like running with a buffer pool too small to contain the non-leaf pages. The test dataset I used has about 600MB of non-leaf pages, about 0.1% of the total size, which was well cached by the 3GB buffer pool. So only one InnoDB page, a leaf page, needed to be read per point-select statement.

To correctly set the ARC size to cache the metadata, you have two choices. First, you can guess values for the ARC size and experiment. Second, you can try to evaluate it by looking at the ZFS internal data. Let’s review these two approaches.

You’ll read/hear often the ratio 1GB of ARC for 1TB of data, which is about the same 0.1% ratio as for InnoDB. I wrote about that ratio a few times, having nothing better to propose. Actually, I found it depends a lot on the recordsize used. The 0.1% ratio implies a ZFS recordsize of 128KB. A ZFS filesystem with a recordsize of 128KB will use much less metadata than another one using a recordsize of 16KB because it has 8x fewer leaf pages. Fewer leaf pages require less B-tree internal nodes, hence less metadata. A filesystem with a recordsize of 128KB is excellent for sequential access as it maximizes compression and reduces the IOPS but it is poor for small random access operations like the ones MySQL/InnoDB does.

To determine the correct ARC size, you can slowly increase the ARC size and monitor the number of metadata cache-misses with the arcstat tool. Here’s an example:

# echo 1073741824 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_max
# arcstat -f time,arcsz,mm%,mhit,mread,dread,pread 10
    time  arcsz  mm%  mhit  mread  dread  pread
10:22:49   105M    0     0     0      0      0
10:22:59   113M  100     0    22     73      0
10:23:09   120M  100     0    20     68      0
10:23:19   127M  100     0    20     65      0
10:23:29   135M  100     0    22     74      0

You’ll want the ‘mm%’, the metadata missed percent, to reach 0. So when the ‘arcsz’ column is no longer growing and you still have high values for ‘mm%’, that means the ARC is too small. Increase the value of ‘zfs_arc_max’ and continue to monitor.

If the 1GB of ARC for 1TB of data ratio is good for large ZFS recordsize, it is likely too small for a recordsize of 16KB. Does 8x more leaf pages automatically require 8x more ARC space for the non-leaf pages? Although likely, let’s verify.

The second option we have is the zdb utility that comes with ZFS, which allows us to view many internal structures including the B-tree list of pages for a given file. The tool needs the inode of a file and the ZFS filesystem as inputs. Here’s an invocation for one of the tables of my dataset:

# cd /var/lib/mysql/data/sbtest
# ls -li | grep sbtest1.ibd
36493 -rw-r----- 1 mysql mysql 2441084928 avr 15 15:28 sbtest1.ibd
# zdb -ddddd mysqldata/data 36493 > zdb5d.out
# more zdb5d.out
Dataset mysqldata/data [ZPL], ID 90, cr_txg 168747, 4.45G, 26487 objects, rootbp DVA[0]=<0:1a50452800:200> DVA[1]=<0:5b289c1600:200> [L0 DMU objset] fletcher4 lz4 LE contiguous unique double size=800L/200P birth=3004977L/3004977P fill=26487 cksum=13723d4400:5d1f47fb738:fbfb87e6e278:1f30c12b7fa1d1
    Object  lvl   iblk   dblk  dsize  lsize   %full  type
     36493    4    16K    16K  1.75G  2.27G   97.62  ZFS plain file
                                        168   bonus  System attributes
        dnode flags: USED_BYTES USERUSED_ACCOUNTED
        dnode maxblkid: 148991
        path    /var/lib/mysql/data/sbtest/sbtest1.ibd
        uid     103
        gid     106
        atime   Sun Apr 15 15:04:13 2018
        mtime   Sun Apr 15 15:28:45 2018
        ctime   Sun Apr 15 15:28:45 2018
        crtime  Sun Apr 15 15:04:13 2018
        gen     3004484
        mode    100640
        size    2441084928
        parent  36480
        links   1
        pflags  40800000004
Indirect blocks:
               0 L3    0:1a4ea58800:400 4000L/400P F=145446 B=3004774/3004774
               0  L2   0:1c83454c00:1800 4000L/1800P F=16384 B=3004773/3004773
               0   L1  0:1eaa626400:1600 4000L/1600P F=128 B=3004773/3004773
               0    L0 0:1c6926ec00:c00 4000L/c00P F=1 B=3004773/3004773
            4000    L0 EMBEDDED et=0 4000L/6bP B=3004484
            8000    L0 0:1c69270c00:400 4000L/400P F=1 B=3004773/3004773
            c000    L0 0:1c7fbae400:800 4000L/800P F=1 B=3004736/3004736
           10000    L0 0:1ce3f53600:3200 4000L/3200P F=1 B=3004484/3004484
           14000    L0 0:1ce3f56800:3200 4000L/3200P F=1 B=3004484/3004484
           18000    L0 0:18176fa600:3200 4000L/3200P F=1 B=3004485/3004485
           1c000    L0 0:18176fd800:3200 4000L/3200P F=1 B=3004485/3004485
           ...
           [more than 140k lines truncated]

The last section of the above output is very interesting as it shows the B-tree pages. The ZFSB-tree of the file sbtest1.ibd has four levels. L3 is the root page, L2 is the first level (from the top) pages, L1 are the second level pages, and L0 are the leaf pages. The metadata is essentially L3 + L2 + L1. When you change the recordsize property of a ZFS filesystem, you affect only the size of the leaf pages.

The non-leaf page size is always 16KB (4000L) and they are always compressed on disk with lzop (If I read correctly). In the ARC, these pages are stored uncompressed so they use 16KB of memory each. The fanout of a ZFS B-tree, the largest possible ratio of a number of pages between levels, is 128. With the above output, we can easily calculate the required size of metadata we would need to cache all the non-leaf pages in the ARC.

# grep -c L3 zdb5d.out
1
# grep -c L2 zdb5d.out
9
# grep -c L1 zdb5d.out
1150
# grep -c L0 zdb5d.out
145447

So, each of the 330 tables of the dataset has 1160 non-leaf pages and 145447 leaf pages; a ratio very close to the prediction of 0.8%. For the complete dataset of 749GB, we would need the ARC to be, at a minimum, 6GB to fully cache all the metadata pages. Of course, there is some overhead to add. In my experiments, I found I needed to add about 15% for ARC overhead in order to have no metadata reads at all. The real minimum for the ARC size I should have used is almost 7GB.

Of course, an ARC of 7GB on a server with 15GB of Ram is not small. Is there a way to do otherwise? The first option we have is to use a larger InnoDB page size, as allowed by MySQL 5.7. Instead of the regular Innodb page size of 16KB, if you use a page size of 32KB with a matching ZFS recordsize, you will cut the ARC size requirement by half, to 0.4% of the uncompressed size.

Similarly, an Innodb page size of 64KB with similar ZFS recordsize would further reduce the ARC size requirement to 0.2%. That approach works best when the dataset is highly compressible. I’ll blog more about the use of larger InnoDB pages with ZFS in a near future. If the use of larger InnoDB page sizes is not a viable option for you, you still have the option of using the ZFS L2ARC feature to save on the required memory.

So, let’s proposed a new rule of thumb for the required ARC/L2ARC size for a a given dataset:

• Recordsize of 128KB => 0.1% of the uncompressed dataset size
• Recordsize of 64KB => 0.2% of the uncompressed dataset size
• Recordsize of 32KB => 0.4% of the uncompressed dataset size
• Recordsize of 16KB => 0.8% of the uncompressed dataset size

The ZFS revenge

In order to improve ZFS performance, I had 3 options:

1. Increase the ARC size to 7GB
2. Use a larger Innodb page size like 64KB
3. Add a L2ARC

I was reluctant to grow the ARC to 7GB, which was nearly half the overall system memory. At best, the ZFS performance would only match XFS. A larger InnoDB page size would increase the CPU load for decompression on an instance with only two vCPUs; not great either. The last option, the L2ARC, was the most promising.

The choice of an i3.large instance type is not accidental. The instance has a 475GB ephemeral NVMe storage device. Let’s try to use this storage for the ZFS L2ARC. The warming of an L2ARC device is not exactly trivial. In my case, with a 1GB ARC, I used:

echo 1073741824 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_max
echo 838860800 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_meta_limit
echo 67108864 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_write_max
echo 134217728 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_write_boost
echo 4 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_headroom
echo 16 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_headroom_boost
echo 0 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_norw
echo 1 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_feed_again
echo 5 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_feed_min_ms
echo 0 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_noprefetch

I then ran ‘cat /var/lib/mysql/data/sbtest/* > /dev/null’ to force filesystem reads and caches on all of the tables. A key setting here to allow the L2ARC to cache data is the zfs_arc_meta_limit. It needs to be slightly smaller than the zfs_arc_max in order to allow some data to be cache in the ARC. Remember that the L2ARC is fed by the LRU of the ARC. You need to cache data in the ARC in order to have data cached in the L2ARC. Using lz4 in ZFS on the sysbench dataset results in a compression ration of only 1.28x. A more realistic dataset would compress by more than 2x, if not 3x. Nevertheless, since the content of the L2ARC is compressed, the 475GB device caches nearly 600GB of the dataset. The figure below shows the sysbench results with the L2ARC enabled:

Now, the comparison is very different. ZFS completely outperforms XFS, 5000 qps for ZFS versus 3000 for XFS. The ZFS results could have been even higher but the two vCPUs of the instance were clearly the bottleneck. Properly configured, ZFS can be pretty fast. Of course, I could use flashcache or bcache with XFS and improve the XFS results but these technologies are way more exotic than the ZFS L2ARC. Also, only the L2ARC stores data in a compressed form, maximizing the use of the NVMe device. Compression also lowers the size requirement and cost for the gp2 disk.

ZFS is much more complex than XFS and EXT4 but, that also means it has more tunables/options. I used a simplistic setup and an unfair benchmark which initially led to poor ZFS results. With the same benchmark, very favorable to XFS, I added a ZFS L2ARC and that completely reversed the situation, more than tripling the ZFS results, now 66% above XFS.

Conclusion

We have seen in this post why the general perception is that ZFS under-performs compared to XFS or EXT4. The presence of B-trees for the files has a big impact on the amount of metadata ZFS needs to handle, especially when the recordsize is small. The metadata consists mostly of the non-leaf pages (or internal nodes) of the B-trees. When properly cached, the performance of ZFS is excellent. ZFS allows you to optimize the use of EBS volumes, both in term of IOPS and size when the instance has fast ephemeral storage devices. Using the ephemeral device of an i3.large instance for the ZFS L2ARC, ZFS outperformed XFS by 66%.

The post About ZFS Performance appeared first on Percona Database Performance Blog.

The ability to restore MySQL logical backups is a significant part of disaster recovery procedures. It’s a last line of defense.

Even if you lost all data from a production server, physical backups (data files snapshot created with an offline copy or with Percona XtraBackup) could show the same internal database structure corruption as in production data. Backups in a simple plain text format allow you to avoid such corruptions and migrate between database formats (e.g., during a software upgrade and downgrade), or even help with migration from completely different database solution.

Unfortunately, the restore speed for logical backups is usually bad, and for a big database it could require days or even weeks to get data back. Thus it’s important to tune backups and MySQL for the fastest data restore and change settings back before production operations.

Disclaimer

All results are specific to my combination of hardware and dataset, but could be used as an illustration for MySQL database tuning procedures related to logical backup restore.

Benchmark

There is no general advice for tuning a MySQL database for a bulk logical backup load, and any parameter should be verified with a test on your hardware and database. In this article, we will explore some variables that help that process. To illustrate the tuning procedure, I’ve downloaded IMDB CSV files and created a MySQL database with pyimdb.

You may repeat the whole benchmark procedure, or just look at settings changed and resulting times.

Database:

• 16GB – InnoDB database size
• 6.6GB – uncompressed mysqldump sql
• 5.8GB – uncompressed CSV + create table statements.

The simplest restore procedure for logical backups created by the mysqldump tool:

mysql -e 'create database imdb;'
time mysql imdb < imdb.sql
# real 129m51.389s

This requires slightly more than two hours to restore the backup into the MySQL instance started with default settings.

I’m using the Docker image percona:latest – it contains Percona Server 5.7.20-19 running on a laptop with 16GB RAM, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz, two disks: SSD KINGSTON RBU-SNS and HDD HGST HTS721010A9.

Let’s start with some “good” settings: buffer pool bigger than default, 2x1GB transaction log files, disable sync (because we are using slow HDD), and set big values for IO capacity,
the load should be faster with big batches thus use 1GB for max_allowed_packet.

Values were chosen to be bigger than the default MySQL parameters because I’m trying to see the difference between the usually suggested values (like 80% of RAM should belong to InnoDB buffer pool).

docker run --publish-all --name p57 -it -e MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=1 percona:5.7
  --innodb_buffer_pool_size=4GB
  --innodb_log_file_size=1G
  --skip-log-bin
  --innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0
  --innodb_flush_method=nosync
  --innodb_io_capacity=2000
  --innodb_io_capacity_max=3000
  --max_allowed_packet=1G
  time (mysql --max_allowed_packet=1G imdb1 < imdb.sql )
  # real 59m34.252s

The load is IO bounded, and there is no reaction on set global foreign_key_checks=0 and unique_checks=0 because these variables are already disabled in the dump file.

How can we reduce IO?

Disable InnoDB double write: --innodb_doublewrite=0

time (mysql --max_allowed_packet=1G imdb1 < imdb.sql )
# real 44m49.963s

A huge improvement, but we still have an IO-bounded load.

We will not be able to improve load time significantly for IO bounded load. Let’s move to SSD:

time (mysql --max_allowed_packet=1G imdb1 < imdb.sql )
# real 33m36.975s

Is it vital to disable disk sync for the InnoDB transaction log?

sudo rm -rf mysql/*
docker rm p57
docker run -v /home/ihanick/Private/Src/tmp/data-movies/imdb.sql:/root/imdb.sql -v /home/ihanick/Private/Src/tmp/data-movies/mysql:/var/lib/mysql
--name p57 -it -e MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=1 percona:5.7
--innodb_buffer_pool_size=4GB
--innodb_log_file_size=1G
--skip-log-bin
--innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0
--innodb_io_capacity=700
--innodb_io_capacity_max=1500
--max_allowed_packet=1G
--innodb_doublewrite=0
# real 33m49.724s

There is no significant difference.

By default, mysqldump produces SQL data, but it could also save data to CSV format:

cd /var/lib/mysql-files
mkdir imdb
chown mysql:mysql imdb/
time mysqldump --max_allowed_packet=128M --tab /var/lib/mysql-files/imdb imdb1
# real 1m45.983s
sudo rm -rf mysql/*
docker rm p57
docker run -v /srv/ihanick/tmp/imdb:/var/lib/mysql-files/imdb -v /home/ihanick/Private/Src/tmp/data-movies/mysql:/var/lib/mysql
--name p57 -it -e MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=1 percona:5.7
--innodb_buffer_pool_size=4GB
--innodb_log_file_size=1G
--skip-log-bin
--innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0
--innodb_io_capacity=700
--innodb_io_capacity_max=1500
--max_allowed_packet=1G
--innodb_doublewrite=0
time (
mysql -e 'drop database imdb1;create database imdb1;set global FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;'
(echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;";cat *.sql) | mysql imdb1 ;
for i in $PWD/*.txt ; do mysqlimport imdb1 $i ; done
)
# real 21m56.049s
1.5X faster, just because of changing the format from SQL to CSV!

We’re still using only one CPU core, let’s improve the load with the –use-threads=4 option:

time (
mysql -e 'drop database if exists imdb1;create database imdb1;set global FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;'
(echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;";cat *.sql) | mysql imdb1
mysqlimport --use-threads=4 imdb1 $PWD/*.txt
)
# real 15m38.147s

In the end, the load is still not fully parallel due to a big table: all other tables are loaded, but one thread is still active.

Let’s split CSV files into smaller ones. For example, 100k rows in each file and load with GNU/parallel:

# /var/lib/mysql-files/imdb/test-restore.sh
apt-get update ; apt-get install -y parallel
cd /var/lib/mysql-files/imdb
time (
cd split1
for i in ../*.txt ; do echo $i ; split -a 6 -l 100000 -- $i `basename $i .txt`. ; done
for i in `ls *.*|sed 's/^[^.]+.//'|sort -u` ; do
mkdir ../split-$i
for j in *.$i ; do mv $j ../split-$i/${j/$i/txt} ; done
done
)
# real 2m26.566s
time (
mysql -e 'drop database if exists imdb1;create database imdb1;set global FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;'
(echo "SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;";cat *.sql) | mysql imdb1
parallel 'mysqlimport imdb1 /var/lib/mysql-files/imdb/{}/*.txt' ::: split-*
)
#real 16m50.314s

Split is not free, but you can split your dump files right after backup.

The load is parallel now, but the single big table strikes back with ‘setting auto-inc lock’ in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUSG

Using the --innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=2 option fixes this issue: 16m2.567s.

We got slightly better results with just mysqlimport --use-threads=4. Let’s check if hyperthreading helps and if the problem caused by “parallel” tool:

• Using four parallel jobs for load: 17m3.662s
• Using four parallel jobs for load and two threads: 16m4.218s

There is no difference between GNU/Parallel and --use-threads option of mysqlimport.

Why 100k rows? With 500k rows: 15m33.258s

Now we have performance better than for mysqlimport --use-threads=4.

How about 1M rows at once? Just 16m52.357s.

I see periodic flushing logs message with bigger transaction logs (2x4GB): 12m18.160s:

--innodb_buffer_pool_size=4GB --innodb_log_file_size=4G --skip-log-bin --innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 --innodb_io_capacity=700 --innodb_io_capacity_max=1500 --max_allowed_packet=1G --innodb_doublewrite=0 --innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=2 --performance-schema=0

Let’s compare the number with myloader 0.6.1 also running with four threads (myloader have only -d parameter, myloader execution time is under corresponding mydumper command):

# oversized statement size to get 0.5M rows in one statement, single statement per chunk file
mydumper -B imdb1 --no-locks --rows 500000 --statement-size 536870912 -o 500kRows512MBstatement
17m59.866s
mydumper -B imdb1 --no-locks -o default_options
17m15.175s
mydumper -B imdb1 --no-locks --chunk-filesize 128 -o chunk128MB
16m36.878s
mydumper -B imdb1 --no-locks --chunk-filesize 64 -o chunk64MB
18m15.266s

It will be great to test mydumper with CSV format, but unfortunately, it wasn’t implemented in the last 1.5 years: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mydumper/+bug/1640550.

Returning back to parallel CSV files load, even bigger transaction logs 2x8GB: 11m15.132s.

What about a bigger buffer pool: --innodb_buffer_pool_size=12G? 9m41.519s

Let’s check six-year-old server-grade hardware: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430 with SAS raid (used only for single SQL file restore test) and NVMe (Intel Corporation PCIe Data Center SSD, used for all other tests).

I’m using similar options as for previous tests, with 100k rows split for CSV files load:

--innodb_buffer_pool_size=8GB --innodb_log_file_size=8G --skip-log-bin --innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 --innodb_io_capacity=700 --innodb_io_capacity_max=1500 --max_allowed_packet=1G --innodb_doublewrite=0 --innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=2

• Single SQL file created by mysqldump loaded for 117m29.062s = 2x slower.
• 24 parallel processes of mysqlimport: 11m51.718s
• Again hyperthreading making a huge difference! 12 parallel jobs: 18m3.699s.
• Due to higher concurrency, adaptive hash index is a reason for locking contention. After disabling it with --skip-innodb_adaptive_hash_index: 10m52.788s.
• In many places, disable unique checks referred as a performance booster: 10m52.489s
  You can spend more time reading advice about unique_checks, but it might help for some databases with many unique indexes (in addition to primary one).
• The buffer pool is smaller than the dataset, can you change old/new pages split to make insert faster? No: --innodb_old_blocks_pct=5 : 10m59.517s.
• O_DIRECT is also recommended: --innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT: 11m1.742s.
• O_DIRECT is not able to improve performance by itself, but if you can use a bigger buffer pool: O_DIRECT + 30% bigger buffer pool: --innodb_buffeer_pool_size=11G: 10m46.716s.

Conclusions

• There is no common solution to improve logical backup restore procedure.
• If you have IO-bounded restore: disable InnoDB double write. It’s safe because even if the database crashes during restore, you can restart the operation.
• Do not use SQL dumps for databases > 5-10GB. CSV files are much faster for mysqldump+mysql. Implement mysqldump --tabs+mysqlimport or use mydumper/myloader with appropriate chunk-filesize.
• The number of rows per load data infile batch is important. Usually 100K-1M, use binary search (2-3 iterations) to find a good value for your dataset.
• InnoDB log file size and buffer pool size are really important options for backup restore performance.
• O_DIRECT reduces insert speed, but it’s good if you can increase the buffer pool size.
• If you have enough RAM or SSD, the restore procedure is limited by CPU. Use a faster CPU (higher frequency, turboboost).
• Hyperthreading also counts.
• A powerful server could be slower than your laptop (12×2.4GHz vs. 4×2.8+turboboost).
• Even with modern hardware, it’s hard to expect backup restore faster than 50MBps (for the final size of InnoDB database).
• You can find a lot of different advice on how to improve backup load speed. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to implement improvements blindly, and you should know the limits of your system with general Unix performance tools like vmstat, iostat and various MySQL commands like SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS (all can be collected together with pt-stalk).
• Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) also provides good graphs, but you should be careful with QAN: full slow query log during logical database dump restore can cause significant processing load.
• Default MySQL settings could cost you 10x backup restore slowdown
• This benchmark is aimed at speeding up the restore procedure while the application is not running and the server is not used in production. Make sure that you have reverted all configuration parameters back to production values after load. For example, if you disable the InnoDB double write buffer during restore and left it enabled in production, you may have scary data corruption due to partial InnoDB pages writes.
• If the application is running during restore, in most cases you will get an inconsistent database due to missing support for locking or correct transactions for restore methods (discussed above).

In this blog post, I will talk about archiving MySQL tables in ClickHouse for storage and analytics.

Why Archive?

Hard drives are cheap nowadays, but storing lots of data in MySQL is not practical and can cause all sorts of performance bottlenecks. To name just a few issues:

1. The larger the table and index, the slower the performance of all operations (both writes and reads)
2. Backup and restore for terabytes of data is more challenging, and if we need to have redundancy (replication slave, clustering, etc.) we will have to store all the data N times

The answer is archiving old data. Archiving does not necessarily mean that the data will be permanently removed. Instead, the archived data can be placed into long-term storage (i.e., AWS S3) or loaded into a special purpose database that is optimized for storage (with compression) and reporting. The data is then available.

Actually, there are multiple use cases:

• Sometimes the data just needs to be stored (i.e., for regulatory purposes) but does not have to be readily available (it’s not “customer facing” data)
• The data might be useful for debugging or investigation (i.e., application or access logs)
• In some cases, the data needs to be available for the customer (i.e., historical reports or bank transactions for the last six years)

In all of those cases, we can move the older data away from MySQL and load it into a “big data” solution. Even if the data needs to be available, we can still move it from the main MySQL server to another system. In this blog post, I will look at archiving MySQL tables in ClickHouse for long-term storage and real-time queries.

How To Archive?

Let’s say we have a 650G table that stores the history of all transactions, and we want to start archiving it. How can we approach this?

First, we will need to split this table into “old” and “new”. I assume that the table is not partitioned (partitioned tables are much easier to deal with). For example, if we have data from 2008 (ten years worth) but only need to store data from the last two months in the main MySQL environment, then deleting the old data would be challenging. So instead of deleting 99% of the data from a huge table, we can create a new table and load the newer data into that. Then rename (swap) the tables. The process might look like this:

1. CREATE TABLE transactions_new LIKE transactions
2. INSERT INTO transactions_new SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE trx_date > now() – interval 2 month
3. RENAME TABLE transactions TO transactions_old, transactions_new TO transactions

Second, we need to move the transactions_old into ClickHouse. This is straightforward — we can pipe data from MySQL to ClickHouse directly. To demonstrate I will use the Wikipedia:Statistics project (a real log of all requests to Wikipedia pages).

Create a table in ClickHouse:

CREATE TABLE wikistat
(
    id bigint,
    dt DateTime,
    project String,
    subproject String,
    path String,
    hits UInt64,
    size UInt64
)
ENGINE = MergeTree
PARTITION BY toYYYYMMDD(dt)
ORDER BY dt
Ok.
0 rows in set. Elapsed: 0.010 sec.

Please note that I’m using the new ClickHouse custom partitioning. It does not require that you create a separate date column to map the table in MySQL to the same table structure in ClickHouse

Now I can “pipe” data directly from MySQL to ClickHouse:

mysql --quick -h localhost wikistats -NBe
"SELECT concat(id,',"',dt,'","',project,'","',subproject,'","', path,'",',hits,',',size) FROM wikistats" |
clickhouse-client -d wikistats --query="INSERT INTO wikistats FORMAT CSV"

Third, we need to set up a constant archiving process so that the data is removed from MySQL and transferred to ClickHouse. To do that we can use the “pt-archiver” tool (part of Percona Toolkit). In this case, we can first archive to a file and then load that file to ClickHouse. Here is the example:

Remove data from MySQL and load to a file (tsv):

pt-archiver --source h=localhost,D=wikistats,t=wikistats,i=dt --where "dt <= '2018-01-01 0:00:00'"  --file load_to_clickhouse.txt --bulk-delete --limit 100000 --progress=100000
TIME                ELAPSED   COUNT
2018-01-25T18:19:59       0       0
2018-01-25T18:20:08       8  100000
2018-01-25T18:20:17      18  200000
2018-01-25T18:20:26      27  300000
2018-01-25T18:20:36      36  400000
2018-01-25T18:20:45      45  500000
2018-01-25T18:20:54      54  600000
2018-01-25T18:21:03      64  700000
2018-01-25T18:21:13      73  800000
2018-01-25T18:21:23      83  900000
2018-01-25T18:21:32      93 1000000
2018-01-25T18:21:42     102 1100000
...

Load the file to ClickHouse:

cat load_to_clickhouse.txt | clickhouse-client -d wikistats --query="INSERT INTO wikistats FORMAT TSV"

The newer version of pt-archiver can use a CSV format as well:

pt-archiver --source h=localhost,D=wikitest,t=wikistats,i=dt --where "dt <= '2018-01-01 0:00:00'"  --file load_to_clickhouse.csv --output-format csv --bulk-delete --limit 10000 --progress=10000

How Much Faster Is It?

Actually, it is much faster in ClickHouse. Even the queries that are based on index scans can be much slower in MySQL compared to ClickHouse.

For example, in MySQL just counting the number of rows for one year can take 34 seconds (index scan):

mysql> select count(*) from wikistats where dt between '2017-01-01 00:00:00' and '2017-12-31 00:00:00';
+-----------+
| count(*)  |
+-----------+
| 103161991 |
+-----------+
1 row in set (34.82 sec)
mysql> explain select count(*) from wikistats where dt between '2017-01-01 00:00:00' and '2017-12-31 00:00:00'G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: wikistats
   partitions: NULL
         type: range
possible_keys: dt
          key: dt
      key_len: 6
          ref: NULL
         rows: 227206802
     filtered: 100.00
        Extra: Using where; Using index
1 row in set, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

In ClickHouse, it only takes 0.062 sec:

:) select count(*) from wikistats where dt between  toDateTime('2017-01-01 00:00:00') and  toDateTime('2017-12-31 00:00:00');
SELECT count(*)
FROM wikistats
WHERE (dt >= toDateTime('2017-01-01 00:00:00')) AND (dt <= toDateTime('2017-12-31 00:00:00'))
????count()??
? 103161991 ?
?????????????
1 rows in set. Elapsed: 0.062 sec. Processed 103.16 million rows, 412.65 MB (1.67 billion rows/s., 6.68 GB/s.)

Size on Disk

In my previous blog on comparing ClickHouse to Apache Spark to MariaDB, I also compared disk size. Usually, we can expect a 10x to 5x decrease in disk size in ClickHouse due to compression. Wikipedia:Statistics, for example, contains actual URIs, which can be quite large due to the article name/search phrase. This can be compressed very well. If we use only integers or use MD5 / SHA1 hashes instead of storing actual URIs, we can expect much smaller compression (i.e., 3x). Even with a 3x compression ratio, it is still pretty good as long-term storage.

Conclusion

As the data in MySQL keeps growing, the performance for all the queries will keep decreasing. Typically, queries that originally took milliseconds can now take seconds (or more). That requires a lot of changes (code, MySQL, etc.) to make faster.

The main goal of archiving the data is to increase performance (“make MySQL fast again”), decrease costs and improve ease of maintenance (backup/restore, cloning the replication slave, etc.). Archiving to ClickHouse allows you to preserve old data and make it available for reports.

While preparing a post on the design of ZFS based servers for use with MySQL, I stumbled on the topic of fsync call performance. The fsync call is very expensive, but it is essential to databases as it allows for durability (the “D” of the ACID acronym).

Let’s first review the type of disk IO operations executed by InnoDB in MySQL. I’ll assume the default InnoDB variable values.

The first and most obvious type of IO are pages reads and writes from the tablespaces. The pages are most often read one at a time, as 16KB random read operations. Writes to the tablespaces are also typically 16KB random operations, but they are done in batches. After every batch, fsync is called on the tablespace file handle.

To avoid partially written pages in the tablespaces (a source of data corruption), InnoDB performs a doublewrite. During a doublewrite operation, a batch of dirty pages, from 1 to about 100 pages, is first written sequentially to the doublewrite buffer and fsynced. The doublewrite buffer is a fixed area of the ibdata1 file, or a specific file with the latest Percona Server for MySQL 5.7. Only then do the writes to the tablespaces of the previous paragraph occur.

That leaves us with the writes to the InnoDB log files. During those writes, the transaction information — a kind of binary diff of the affected pages — is written to the log files and then the log file is fsynced. The duration of the fsync call can be a major contributor to the COMMIT latency.

Because the fsync call takes time, it greatly affects the performance of MySQL. Because of this, you probably noticed there are many status variables that relate to fsyncs. To overcome the inherent limitations of the storage devices, group commit allows multiple simultaneous transactions to fsync the log file once for all the transactions waiting for the fsync. There is no need for a transaction to call fsync for a write operation that another transaction already forced to disk. A series of write transactions sent over a single database connection cannot benefit from group commit.

Fsync Results

In order to evaluate the fsync performance, I used the following Python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys, mmap
# Open a file
fd = os.open( "testfile", os.O_RDWR|os.O_CREAT|os.O_DIRECT )
m = mmap.mmap(-1, 512)
for i in range (1,1000):
   os.lseek(fd,os.SEEK_SET,0)
   m[1] = "1"
   os.write(fd, m)
   os.fsync(fd)
# Close opened file
os.close( fd )

The script opens a file with the O_DIRECT flag, writes and fsyncs it 1000 times and close the file. I added O_DIRECT after an internal discussion with my colleagues, but it doesn’t change the results and it doesn’t remove the need for calling fsync. We’ll discuss in more detail the impacts of O_DIRECT after we reviewed the results. The script is called with the time command like below:

root@lab:/tmp/testfsync# time python /root/fsync.py
real 0m18.320s
user 0m0.060s
sys 0m0.096s

In the above example using a 7.2k rpm drive, the fsync rate is about 56/s for a latency of 18ms. A 7.2k RPM drive performs 120 rotations per second. On average, the fsyncs require a bit more than two rotations to complete. The filesystem appears to make very little differences: ext4 and XFS show similar results. That means if MySQL uses such storage devices for the InnoDB log files, the latency of each transaction is at least 18ms. If the application workload requires 200 write transactions per second, they’ll need to be executed using at least four database connections.

So, let’s begin with rotational devices. These are becoming a bit less common now with databases, especially without a raid controller. I could only find a few.

Drive	RPM	Rate	Latency	Notes
WDC WD2500BJKT	5400	22/s	45 ms	Laptop SATA from 2009
ST2000LM003	5400	15/s	66 ms	USB-3 portable drive
ST3750528AS	7200	40/s	25 ms	Desktop grade SATA
WD2502ABYS-18B7A0	7200	56/s	18 ms	Desktop grade SATA
HUA723020ALA641	7200	50/s	20 ms	Enterprise grade SATA, md mirror
Dell SAS unknown	7200	58/s	17 ms	Behind Perc ctrl but no write cache
HDWE150	7200	43/s	23 ms	Recent Desktop grade SATA, 5TB

 

I unfortunately didn’t have access to any 10k or 15k RPM drives that were not behind a raid controller with a write cache. If you have access to such drives, run the above script a few times and send me your results, that would help create a more complete picture! So, we can see a correlation between the rotational speed and the fsync rate, which makes sense. The faster a disk turns, the faster it can fsync. The fsync call saves the data and then updates the metadata. Hence, the heads need to move. That’s probably the main explanation for the remaining disparity. A good point, all drives appears to be fully complying with the SATA flush command even though they all have an enabled write cache. Disabling the drives write caches made no difference.

With the above number, the possible transaction rates in fully ACID mode is pretty depressing. But those drives were rotating ones, what about SSD drives? SSD are memory devices and are much faster for random IO operations. There are extremely fast for reads, and good for writes. But as you will see below, not that great for fsyncs.

Drive	rate	latency	notes
SAMSUNG MZ7LN512	160/s	6.3ms	Consumer grade SATA
Crucial_CT480M500SSD1	108/s	9.3ms	Consumer grade SATA
Intel 520	2031/s	0.49ms	Consumer grade SATA
SAMSUNG MZVPV512HDGL	104/s	9.6ms	Consumer grade NVMe
Samsung SSD 960 PRO	267/s	3.8ms	High-end consumer grade NVMe
Intel PC-3100	1274/s	0.79ms	Low-end consumer grade NVMe (cheat?)
Intel 750	2038/s	0.49ms	High-end consumer grade NVMe
Intel PC-3700	7380/s	0.14ms	High-end enterprise-grade NVMe

 

Again, this is a small sample of the devices I have access to. All SSD/Flash have write caches, but only the high-end devices have capacitors to flush their write cache to the flash with a loss of power. The PC-3100 device is actually in my home server, and it is obviously cheating. If you look at the card specs on the Intel website, it doesn’t have the “Enhanced Power Loss Data Protection” and “End-to-End Data Protection” features. The much more expansive PC-3700 does. I use the PC-3100 as a ZFS L2ARC device, so I am good. In general, the performance of a flash device varies a bit more than rotational devices, since factors like the number of recent writes and the filling factor come into play.

Even when using a high-end NVMe device like the PC-3700, you can’t reach 10k fully ACID transactions per second at low thread concurrency. How do you reach the higher levels? The answer here is the good old raid controller with a protected write cache. The write cache is basically using DRAM memory protected from power loss by a battery. SAN controllers have similar caches. The writes to the InnoDB log files are sequential writes interleaved with fsyncs. The raid controller concatenates the sequential writes, eventually writing one big chunk on disk and… ignoring the fsyncs. Here’s the result from the only device I had access to:

Drive	rate	latency	notes
Dell Perc with BBU	23000/s	0.04ms	Array of 7.2k rpm drives

 

That’s extremely fast but, of course, it is memory. I modified the script to loop 10k times instead of 1k. In theory, something a single slave thread doing simple transactions could reach a rate of 20k/s or more while being fully ACID.

Discussion

We must always consider the results we got in the previous section in the context of a given application. For example, a server using an Intel PC-3700 NVMe card can do more than 7000 fully ACID transactions per second even if it is fully durable provided those transactions are issued by a sufficient number of threads. Adding threads will not allow scaling infinitely. At some point, other bottlenecks like mutex contention or page flushing will dominate.

We often say that Galera-based cluster solutions like Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) add latency to the transactions, since it involves communication over the network. With the Galera protocol, a commit operation returns only when all the nodes have received the data. Thus, tt is a good practice to relax the local durability and use innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit set to 0 or 2. On a local network, the ping time is always below 1ms and often below 0.1ms. As a result, the transaction latency is often smaller.

About fdatasync

The fsync system is not the only system call that persists data to disk. There is also the fdatasync call. fdatasync persists the data to disk but does not update the metadata information like the file size and last update time. Said otherwise, it performs one write operation instead of two. In the Python script, if I replace os.fsync with os.fdatasync, here are the results for a subset of devices:

Drive	rpm	rate	latency	notes
ST2000LM003	5400	72/s	13 ms	USB-3 portable drive
WD2502ABYS-18B7A0	7200	118/s	8.5 ms	Desktop grade SATA
SAMSUNG MZ7LN512	N/A	333/s	3.0ms	Consumer grade SATA
Crucial_CT480M500SSD1	N/A	213/s	4.7ms	Consumer grade SATA
Samsung SSD 960 PRO	N/A	714/s	1.4ms	High-end consumer grade NVMe

 

In all cases, the resulting rates have more than doubled. The fdatasync call has a troubled history, as there were issues with it many years ago. Because of those issues, InnoDB never uses fdatasync, only fsyncs. You can find the following comments in the InnoDB os/os0file.cc:

/* We let O_SYNC only affect log files; note that we map O_DSYNC to
O_SYNC because the datasync options seemed to corrupt files in 2001
in both Linux and Solaris */

2001 is a long time ago. Given the above results, maybe we should reconsider the use of fdatasync. From the Linux main page on fdatasync, you find:

fdatasync() is similar to fsync(), but does not flush modified
metadata unless that metadata is needed in order to allow a
subsequent data retrieval to be correctly handled. For example,
changes to st_atime or st_mtime (respectively, time of last
access and time of last modification; see stat(2)) do not require
flushing because they are not necessary for a subsequent data
read to be handled correctly. On the other hand, a change to
the file size (st_size, as made by say ftruncate(2)), would
require a metadata flush.

So, even with fdatasync, operations like extending an InnoDB tablespace will update the metadata correctly. This appears to be an interesting low-hanging fruit in term of MySQL performance. In fact, webscalesql already have fdatasync available

O_DIRECT

Why do we need a fsync or fdatasync with O_DIRECT? With O_DIRECT, the OS is not buffering anything along the way. So the data should be persisted right? Actually, the OS is not buffering but the device very likely is. Here are a few results to highlight the point using a 7.2k rpm SATA drive:

Test	rate	latency
O_DIRECT, drive Write cache enabled	4651/s	0.22ms
O_DIRECT, drive Write cache disabled	101/s	9.9ms
ASYNC + fdatasync, Write cache enabled	119/s	8.4ms
ASYNC + fdatasync, Write cache disabled	117/s	8.5ms

 

The drive write cache was enabled/disabled using the hdparm command. Clearly, there’s no way the drive can persist 4651 writes per second. O_DIRECT doesn’t send the SATA flush command to the disk, so we are only writing to the drive write cache. If the drive write cache is disabled, the rate falls to a more reasonable value of 101/s. What is interesting — and I don’t really understand why — is that opening the file in async mode and performing fdatasync is significantly faster. As expected, the presence of the drive write cache has no impacts on ASYNC + fdatasync. When the fdatasync call occurs, the data is still in the OS file cache.

If you want to use only O_DIRECT, you should make sure all the storage write caches are crash safe. That’s why MySQL adds a fsync call after a write to a file opened with O_DIRECT.

ZFS

These days, I find it difficult to write a blog post without talking about ZFS. How does ZFS handles fsyncs and fdatasyncs? ZFS, like a database, performs write ahead logging in the ZIL. That means calls like fsync and fdatasync return when the data has been persisted to the ZIL, and not to the actual filesystem. The real write operation is done a few seconds later by a background thread. That means the added write for the metadata does not impact performance right away. My home server uses ZFS over a pair of 7.2k RPM drive and doesn’t have a SLOG device. The ZIL is thus stored on the 7.2k RPM drives. The results are the following:

Drive	rpm	rate	latency
ZFS fsync	7200	104/s	9.6 ms
ZFS fdatasync	7200	107/s	9.3 ms

 

Remember that with ZFS, you need to disable the O_DIRECT mode. The fdatasync rate appears to be slightly faster, but it is not really significant. With ZFS, the fsync/fdatasync performance relates to where the ZIL is stored. If there is no SLOG device, the ZIL is stored with the data and thus, the persitence performance of the devices used for the data matter. If there is a SLOG device, the persistence performance is governed by the specs of the device(s) on which the SLOG is located. That’s a very important aspect we have to consider when designing a MySQL server that will use ZFS. The design of such server will be discussed in more details in a future post.

This post is a hands-on look at ZFS with MySQL.

In my previous post, I highlighted the similarities between MySQL and ZFS. Before going any further, I’d like you to be able to play and experiment with ZFS. This post shows you how to configure ZFS with MySQL in a minimalistic way on either Ubuntu 16.04 or Centos 7.

Installation

In order to be able to use ZFS, you need some available storage space. For storage – since the goal here is just to have a hands-on experience – we’ll use a simple file as a storage device. Although simplistic, I have now been using a similar setup on my laptop for nearly three years (just can’t get rid of it, it is too useful). For simplicity, I suggest you use a small Centos7 or Ubuntu 16.04 VM with one core, 8GB of disk and 1GB of RAM.

First, you need to install ZFS as it is not installed by default. On Ubuntu 16.04, you simply need to run:

root@Ubuntu1604:~# apt-get install zfs-dkms zfsutils-linux

On RedHat or Centos 7.4, the procedure is a bit more complex. First, we need to install the EPEL ZFS repository:

[root@Centos7 ~]# yum install http://download.zfsonlinux.org/epel/zfs-release.el7_4.noarch.rpm
[root@Centos7 ~]# gpg --quiet --with-fingerprint /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
[root@Centos7 ~]# gpg --quiet --with-fingerprint /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7

Apparently, there were issues with ZFS kmod kernel modules on RedHat/Centos. I never had any issues with Ubuntu (and who knows how often the kernel is updated). Anyway, it is recommended that you enable kABI-tracking kmods. Edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/zfs.repo, disable the ZFS repo and enable the zfs-kmod repo. The beginning of the file should look like:

[zfs]
name=ZFS on Linux for EL7 - dkms
baseurl=http://download.zfsonlinux.org/epel/7.4/$basearch/
enabled=0
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
[zfs-kmod]
name=ZFS on Linux for EL7 - kmod
baseurl=http://download.zfsonlinux.org/epel/7.4/kmod/$basearch/
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
...

Now, we can proceed and install ZFS:

[root@Centos7 ~]# yum install zfs

After the installation, I have ZFS version 0.6.5.6 on Ubuntu and version 0.7.3.0 on Centos7. The version difference doesn’t matter for what will follow.

Setup

So, we need a container for the data. You can use any of the following options for storage:

• A free disk device
• A free partition
• An empty LVM logical volume
• A file

The easiest solution is to use a file, and so that’s what I’ll use here. A file is not the fastest and most efficient storage, but it is fine for our hands-on. In production, please use real devices. A more realistic server configuration will be discussed in a future post. The following steps are identical on Ubuntu and Centos. The first step is to create the storage file. I’ll use a file of 1~GB in /mnt. Adjust the size and path to whatever suits the resources you have:

[root@Centos7 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zfs.img bs=1024 count=1048576

The result is a 1GB file in /mnt:

[root@Centos7 ~]# ls -lh /mnt
total 1,0G
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root 1,0G 16 nov 16:50 zfs.img

Now, we will create our ZFS pool, mysqldata, using the file we just created:

[root@Centos7 ~]# modprobe zfs
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool create mysqldata /mnt/zfs.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool status
  pool: mysqldata
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
        NAME            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        mysqldata       ONLINE       0     0     0
          /mnt/zfs.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs list
NAME        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mysqldata  79,5K   880M    24K  /mysqldata

If you have a result similar to the above, congratulations, you have a ZFS pool. If you put files in /mysqldata, they are in ZFS.

MySQL installation

Now, let’s install MySQL and play around a bit. We’ll begin by installing the Percona repository:

root@Ubuntu1604:~# cd /tmp
root@Ubuntu1604:/tmp# wget https://repo.percona.com/apt/percona-release_0.1-4.$(lsb_release -sc)_all.deb
root@Ubuntu1604:/tmp# dpkg -i percona-release_*.deb
root@Ubuntu1604:/tmp# apt-get update
[root@Centos7 ~]# yum install http://www.percona.com/downloads/percona-release/redhat/0.1-4/percona-release-0.1-4.noarch.rpm

Next, we install Percona Server for MySQL 5.7:

root@Ubuntu1604:~# apt-get install percona-server-server-5.7
root@Ubuntu1604:~# systemctl start mysql
[root@Centos7 ~]# yum install Percona-Server-server-57
[root@Centos7 ~]# systemctl start mysql

The installation command pulls all the dependencies and sets up the MySQL root password. On Ubuntu, the install script asks for the password, but on Centos7 a random password is set. To retrieve the random password:

[root@Centos7 ~]# grep password /var/log/mysqld.log
2017-11-21T18:37:52.435067Z 1 [Note] A temporary password is generated for root@localhost: XayhVloV+9g+

The following step is to reset the root password:

[root@Centos7 ~]# mysql -p -e "ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Mysql57OnZfs_';"
Enter password:

Since 5.7.15, the password validation plugin by defaults requires a length greater than 8, mixed cases, at least one digit and at least one special character. On either Linux distributions, I suggest you set the credentials in the /root/.my.cnf file like this:

[# cat /root/.my.cnf
[client]
user=root
password=Mysql57OnZfs_

MySQL configuration for ZFS

Now that we have both ZFS and MySQL, we need some configuration to make them play together. From here, the steps are the same on Ubuntu and Centos. First, we stop MySQL:

# systemctl stop mysql

Then, we’ll configure ZFS. We will create three ZFS filesystems in our pool:

• mysql will be the top level filesystem for the MySQL related data. This filesystem will not directly have data in it, but data will be stored in the other filesystems that we create. The utility of the mysql filesystem will become obvious when we talk about snapshots. Something to keep in mind for the next steps, the properties of a filesystem are by default inherited from the upper level.
• mysql/data will be the actual datadir. The files in the datadir are mostly accessed through random IO operations, so we’ll set the ZFS recordsize to match the InnoDB page size.
• mysql/log will be where the log files will be stored. By log files, I primarily mean the InnoDB log files. But the binary log file, the slow query log and the error log will all be stored in that directory. The log files are accessed through sequential IO operations. We’ll thus use a bigger ZFS recordsize in order to maximize the compression efficiency.

Let’s begin with the top-level MySQL container. I could have used directly mysqldata, but that would somewhat limit us. The following steps create the filesystem and set some properties:

# zfs create mysqldata/mysql
# zfs set compression=gzip mysqldata/mysql
# zfs set recordsize=128k mysqldata/mysql
# zfs set atime=off mysqldata/mysql

I just set compression to ‘gzip’ (the equivalent of gzip level 6), recordsize to 128KB and atime (the file’s access time) to off. Once we are done with the mysql filesystem, we can proceed with the data and log filesystems:

# zfs create mysqldata/mysql/log
# zfs create mysqldata/mysql/data
# zfs set recordsize=16k mysqldata/mysql/data
# zfs set primarycache=metadata mysqldata/mysql/data
# zfs get compression,recordsize,atime mysqldata/mysql/data
NAME                  PROPERTY     VALUE     SOURCE
mysqldata/mysql/data  compression  gzip      inherited from mysqldata/mysql
mysqldata/mysql/data  recordsize   16K       local
mysqldata/mysql/data  atime        off       inherited from mysqldata/mysql

Of course, there are other properties that could be set, but let’s keep things simple. Now that the filesystems are ready, let’s move the files to ZFS (make sure you stopped MySQL):

# mv /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile* /mysqldata/mysql/log/
# mv /var/lib/mysql/* /mysqldata/mysql/data/

and then set the real mount points:

# zfs set mountpoint=/var/lib/mysql mysqldata/mysql/data
# zfs set mountpoint=/var/lib/mysql-log mysqldata/mysql/log
# chown mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql-log

Now we have:

# zfs list
NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mysqldata             1,66M   878M  25,5K  /mysqldata
mysqldata/mysql       1,54M   878M    25K  /mysqldata/mysql
mysqldata/mysql/data   890K   878M   890K  /var/lib/mysql
mysqldata/mysql/log    662K   878M   662K  /var/lib/mysql-log

We must adjust the MySQL configuration accordingly. Here’s what I put in my /etc/my.cnf file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf on Ubuntu):

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql-log
innodb_doublewrite = 0
innodb_checksum_algorithm = none
slow_query_log = /var/lib/mysql-log/slow.log
log-error = /var/lib/mysql-log/error.log
server_id = 12345
log_bin = /var/lib/mysql-log/binlog
relay_log=/var/lib/mysql-log/relay-bin
expire_logs_days=7
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

On Centos 7, selinux prevented MySQL from accessing files in /var/lib/mysql-log. I had to perform the following steps:

[root@Centos7 ~]# yum install policycoreutils-python
[root@Centos7 ~]# semanage fcontext -a -t mysqld_db_t "/var/lib/mysql-log(/.*)?"
[root@Centos7 ~]# chcon -Rv --type=mysqld_db_t /var/lib/mysql-log/

I could have just disabled selinux since it is a test server, but if I don’t get my hands dirty on selinux once in a while with semanage and chcon I will not remember how to do it. Selinux is an important security tool on Linux (but that’s another story).

At this point, feel free to start using your test MySQL database on ZFS.

Monitoring ZFS

To monitor ZFS, you can use the zpool command like this:

[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool iostat 3
              capacity     operations     bandwidth
pool        alloc   free   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
mysqldata   19,6M   988M      0      0      0    290
mysqldata   19,3M   989M      0     44      0  1,66M
mysqldata   23,4M   985M      0     49      0  1,33M
mysqldata   23,4M   985M      0     40      0   694K
mysqldata   26,7M   981M      0     39      0   561K
mysqldata   26,7M   981M      0     37      0   776K
mysqldata   23,8M   984M      0     43      0   634K

This shows the ZFS activity while I was loading some data. Also, the following command gives you an estimate of the compression ratio:

[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs get compressratio,used,logicalused mysqldata/mysql
NAME             PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
mysqldata/mysql  compressratio  4.10x  -
mysqldata/mysql  used           116M   -
mysqldata/mysql  logicalused    469M   -
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs get compressratio,used,logicalused mysqldata/mysql/data
NAME                  PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
mysqldata/mysql/data  compressratio  4.03x  -
mysqldata/mysql/data  used           67,9M  -
mysqldata/mysql/data  logicalused    268M   -
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs get compressratio,used,logicalused mysqldata/mysql/log
NAME                 PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
mysqldata/mysql/log  compressratio  4.21x  -
mysqldata/mysql/log  used           47,8M  -
mysqldata/mysql/log  logicalused    201M   -

In my case, the dataset compresses very well (4x). Another way to see how files are compressed is to use ls and du. ls returns the actual uncompressed size of the file, while du returns the compressed size. Here’s an example:

[root@Centos7 mysql]# -lah ibdata1
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 90M nov 24 16:09 ibdata1
[root@Centos7 mysql]# du -hs ibdata1
14M     ibdata1

I really invite you to further experiment and get a feeling of how ZFS and MySQL behave together.

Snapshots and backups

A great feature of ZFS that work really well with MySQL are snapshots. A snapshot is a consistent view of the filesystem at a given point in time. Normally, it is best to perform a snapshot while a flush tables with read lock is held. That allows you to record the master position, and also to flush MyISAM tables. It is quite easy to do that. Here’s how I create a snapshot with MySQL:

[root@Centos7 ~]# mysql -e 'flush tables with read lock;show master status;! zfs snapshot -r mysqldata/mysql@my_first_snapshot'
+---------------+-----------+--------------+------------------+-------------------+
| File          | Position  | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB | Executed_Gtid_Set |
+---------------+-----------+--------------+------------------+-------------------+
| binlog.000002 | 110295083 |              |                  |                   |
+---------------+-----------+--------------+------------------+-------------------+
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs list -t snapshot
NAME                                     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mysqldata/mysql@my_first_snapshot          0B      -    24K  -
mysqldata/mysql/data@my_first_snapshot     0B      -  67,9M  -
mysqldata/mysql/log@my_first_snapshot      0B      -  47,8M  -

The command took about 1s. The only time where such commands would take more time is when there are MyISAM tables with a lot of pending updates to the indices, or when there are long running transactions. You probably wonder why the “USED” column reports 0B. That’s simply because there were no changes to the filesystem since the snapshot was created. It is a measure of the amount of data that hasn’t been free because the snapshot requires the data. Said otherwise, it how far the snapshot has diverged from its parent. You can access the snapshot through a clone or through ZFS as a file system. To access the snapshot through ZFS, you have to set the snapdir parameter to “visible, ” and then you can see the files. Here’s how:

[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs set snapdir=visible mysqldata/mysql/data
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs set snapdir=visible mysqldata/mysql/log
[root@Centos7 ~]# ls /var/lib/mysql-log/.zfs/snapshot/my_first_snapshot/
binlog.000001  binlog.000002  binlog.index  error.log  ib_logfile0  ib_logfile1

The files in the snapshot directory are read-only. If you want to be able to write to the files, you first need to clone the snapshots:

[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs create mysqldata/mysqlslave
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs clone mysqldata/mysql/data@my_first_snapshot mysqldata/mysqlslave/data
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs clone mysqldata/mysql/log@my_first_snapshot mysqldata/mysqlslave/log
[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs list
NAME                        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
mysqldata                   116M   764M    26K  /mysqldata
mysqldata/mysql             116M   764M    24K  /mysqldata/mysql
mysqldata/mysql/data       67,9M   764M  67,9M  /var/lib/mysql
mysqldata/mysql/log        47,8M   764M  47,8M  /var/lib/mysql-log
mysqldata/mysqlslave         28K   764M    26K  /mysqldata/mysqlslave
mysqldata/mysqlslave/data     1K   764M  67,9M  /mysqldata/mysqlslave/data
mysqldata/mysqlslave/log      1K   764M  47,8M  /mysqldata/mysqlslave/log

At this point, it is up to you to use the clones to spin up a local slave. Like for the snapshots, the clone only grows in size when actual data is written to it. ZFS records that haven’t changed since the snapshot was taken are shared. That’s a huge space savings. For a customer, I once wrote a script to automatically create five MySQL slaves for their developers. The developers would do tests, and often replication broke. Rerunning the script would recreate fresh slaves in a matter of a few minutes. My ZFS snapshot script and the script I wrote to create the clone based slaves are available here: https://github.com/y-trudeau/Yves-zfs-tools

Optional features

In the previous post, I talked about a SLOG device for the ZIL and the L2ARC, a disk extension of the ARC cache. If you promise to never use the following trick in production, here’s how to speed MySQL on ZFS drastically:

[root@Centos7 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/zil_slog.img bs=1024 count=131072
131072+0 enregistrements lus
131072+0 enregistrements écrits
134217728 octets (134 MB) copiés, 0,373809 s, 359 MB/s
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool add mysqldata log /dev/shm/zil_slog.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool status
  pool: mysqldata
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
        NAME                     STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        mysqldata                ONLINE       0     0     0
          /mnt/zfs.img           ONLINE       0     0     0
        logs
          /dev/shm/zil_slog.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors

The data in the SLOG is critical for ZFS recovery. I performed some tests with virtual machines, and if you crash the server and lose the SLOG you may lose all the data stored in the ZFS pool. Normally, the SLOG is on a mirror in order to lower the risk of losing it. The SLOG can be added and removed online.

I know I asked you to promise to never use an shm file as SLOG in production. Actually, there are exceptions. I would not hesitate to temporarily use such a trick to speed up a lagging slave. Another situation where such a trick could be used is with Percona XtraDB Cluster. With a cluster, there are multiple copies of the dataset. Even if one node crashed and lost its ZFS filesystems, it could easily be reconfigured and reprovisioned from the surviving nodes.

The other optional feature I want to cover is a cache device. The cache device is what is used for the L2ARC. The content of the L2ARC is compressed as the original data is compressed. To add a cache device (again an shm file), do:

[root@Centos7 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/l2arc.img bs=1024 count=131072
131072+0 enregistrements lus
131072+0 enregistrements écrits
134217728 octets (134 MB) copiés, 0,272323 s, 493 MB/s
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool add mysqldata cache /dev/shm/l2arc.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool status
  pool: mysqldata
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:
    NAME                     STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    mysqldata                ONLINE       0     0     0
      /mnt/zfs.img           ONLINE       0     0     0
    logs
      /dev/shm/zil_slog.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
    cache
      /dev/shm/l2arc.img     ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors

To monitor the L2ARC (and also the ARC), look at the file: /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/arcstats. As the ZFS filesystems are configured right now, very little will go to the L2ARC. This can be frustrating. The reason is that the L2ARC is filled by the elements evicted from the ARC. If you recall, we have set primarycache=metatdata for the filesystem containing the actual data. Hence, in order to get some data to our L2ARC, I suggest the following steps:

[root@Centos7 ~]# zfs set primarycache=all mysqldata/mysql/data
[root@Centos7 ~]# echo 67108864 > /sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_max
[root@Centos7 ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
[root@Centos7 ~]# grep '^size' /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/arcstats
size                            4    65097584

It takes the echo command to drop_caches to force a re-initialization of the ARC. Now, InnoDB data starts to be cached in the L2ARC. The way data is sent to the L2ARC has many tunables, which I won’t discuss here. I chose 64MB for the ARC size mainly because I am using a low memory VM. A size of 64MB is aggressively small and will slow down ZFS if the metadata doesn’t fit in the ARC. Normally you should use a larger value. The actual good size depends on many parameters like the filesystem system size, the number of files and the presence of a L2ARC. You can monitor the ARC and L2ARC using the arcstat tool that comes with ZFS on Linux (when you use Centos 7). With Ubuntu, download the tool from here.

Removal

So the ZFS party is over? We need to clean up the mess! Let’s begin:

[root@Centos7 ~]# systemctl stop mysql
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool remove /dev/shm/l2arc.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool remove mysqldata /dev/shm/zil_slog.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# rm -f /dev/shm/*.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# zpool destroy mysqldata
[root@Centos7 ~]# rm -f /mnt/zfs.img
[root@Centos7 ~]# yum erase spl kmod-spl libzpool2 libzfs2 kmod-zfs zfs

The last step is different on Ubuntu:

root@Ubuntu1604:~# apt-get remove spl-dkms zfs-dkms libzpool2linux libzfs2linux spl zfsutils-linux zfs-zed

Conclusion

With this guide, I hope I provided a positive first experience in using ZFS with MySQL. The configuration is simple, and not optimized for performance. However, we’ll look at more realistic configurations in future posts.

Since the purpose of a database system is to store data, there is close relationship with the filesystem. As MySQL consultants, we always look at the filesystems for performance tuning opportunities. The most common choices in term of filesystems are XFS and EXT4, on Linux it is exceptional to encounter another filesystem. Both XFS and EXT4 have pros and cons but their behaviors are well known and they perform well. They perform well but they are not without shortcomings.

Over the years, we have developed a bunch of tools and techniques to overcome these shortcomings. For example, since they don’t allow a consistent view of the filesystem, we wrote tools like Xtrabackup to backup a live MySQL database. Another example is the InnoDB double write buffer. The InnoDB double write buffer is required only because neither XFS nor EXT4 is transactional. There is one filesystem which offers nearly all the features we need, ZFS.  ZFS is arguably the most advanced filesystem available on Linux. Maybe it is time to reconsider the use of ZFS with MySQL.

ZFS on Linux or ZoL (from the OpenZFS project), has been around for quite a long time now. I first started using ZoL back in 2012, before it was GA (general availability), in order to solve a nearly impossible challenge to backup a large database (~400 GB) with a mix of InnoDB and MyISAM tables. Yes, ZFS allows that very easily, in just a few seconds. As of 2017, ZoL has been GA for more than 3 years and most of the issues that affected it in the early days have been fixed. ZFS is also GA in FreeBSD, illumos, OmniOS and many others.

This post will hopefully be the first of many posts, devoted to the use of ZFS with MySQL. The goal here is not to blindly push for ZFS but to see when ZFS can help solve real problems. We will first examine ZFS and try to draw parallels with the architecture of MySQL. This will help us to better understand how ZFS works and behaves. Future posts will be devoted to more specific topics like performance, PXC, backups, compression, database operations, bad and poor use cases and sample configurations.

Some context

ZFS is a filesystem that was developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced for the first time in with OpenSolaris in 2005. ZFS is unique in many ways, let’s first have a look at its code base using the sloccount tool which provides an estimation of the development effort.

• EXT4: 8.5 person-years
• XFS: 17 person-years
• ZFS: 77 person-years

In term of code base complexity, it is approaching 10 times the complexity of EXT4, the above graphic shows the scale. To put things in perspective, the sloccount development effort for Percona-Server 5.7 which is based on MySQL community 5.7, is estimated at 680 person-years. The ZoL development is sponsored by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the project is very active.

ZFS features

Why does ZFS need such a large code base? Well, in Linux, it functionally replaces MD (software raid), LVM (volume manager) and the filesystem. ZFS is really a transactional database designed to support filesystem operations. Let’s review the ZFS main features.

128 bits filesystem

That’s huge! According to Jeff Bonwick (https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high), the rest energy of such a storage device would be enough to boil the oceans.  It seems inconceivable that we’d ever need a larger filesystem.

Copy-on-write (COW)

When ZFS needs to update a record it does not overwrite it. Instead, it writes a new record, change the pointers and then frees up the old one if it is no longer referenced. That design is at the core of ZFS. It allows for features like free snapshots and transactions.

Snapshot

ZFS supports snapshots, and because of its COW architecture taking a snapshot is merely a matter of recording a transaction number and telling ZFS to protect the referenced records from its garbage collector. This is very similar to the InnoDB MVCC. If a read view is kept open, InnoDB keeps a copy of each of the rows that changed in the undo log, and those rows are not purged until the transaction commits.

Clone

A ZFS snapshot can be cloned and then written too. At this point, the clone is like a fork for the original data. There is no equivalent feature in MySQL/InnoDB.

Checksum

All the ZFS records have a checksum. This is exactly like the page checksums of InnoDB. If a record is found to have an invalid checksum, it is automatically replaced by a copy, provided one is available. It is normal to define a ZFS production with more than one copy of the data set. With ZFS, we can safely disable InnoDB checksums.

Compression

ZFS records can be compressed transparently. The most common algorithms are gzip and lz4. The data is compressed per record and the recordsize is an adjustable property. The principle is similar to transparent InnoDB page compression but without the need for punching holes. In nearly all the ZFS setups I have worked with, enabling compression helped performance.

Encryption

ZoL doesn’t support transparent encryption of the records yet, but the encryption code is currently under review. If all goes well, the encryption should be available in a matter of a few months. Once there, it will offer another option for encryption at rest with MySQL. That feature compares very well with InnoDB tablespace encryption.

Transactional

An fsync on ZFS is transactional. This comes mainly from the fact that ZFS uses COW. When a file is opened with O_SYNC or O_DSYNC, ZFS behaves like a database where the fsync calls represent commits. The writes are atomic. The fsync calls return as soon as ZFS has written the data to the ZIL (ZFS Intent Log).  Later, a background process flushes the data accumulated in the ZIL to the actual data store. This flushing process is called at an interval of txg_timeout. By default, txg_timeout is set to 5s.  The process is extremely similar to the way InnoDB flushes pages.  A direct benefit for MySQL is the possibility of disabling the InnoDB doublewrite buffer. The InnoDB doublewrite buffer is often a source of contention in a heavy write environment, although the latest Percona Server releases have parallel doublewrite buffers that relieve most of the issue.

ZIL/SLOG

The transactional support in ZFS bears a huge price in term of latency, since the synchronous writes and fsyncs involve many random write IO operations. Since ZFS is transactional, it needs a transactional journal, the ZIL. ZIL stands for ‘ZFS Intent Log’. There is always a ZIL. The ZIL serves a purpose very similar to the InnoDB log files. The ZIL is written to sequentially, is fsynced often, and read from only for recovery after a crash. The goal is to delay random write IO operations by writing sequentially pending changes to a device. By default the ZIL delays the actual writes by only 5s (zfs_txg_timeout) but that’s still very significant. To help synchronous write performance, ZFS has the possibility of locating the ZIL on a Separate Intent Log (SLOG).

The SLOG device doesn’t need to be very large, a few GB is often enough, but it must be fast for sequential writes and fast for fsyncs. A fast flash device with good write endurance or spinners behind a raid controller with a protected write cache are great SLOG devices. Normally, the SLOG is on a redundant device like a mirror since losing the ZIL can be dramatic. With MySQL, the presence of a fast SLOG is extremely important for performance.

ARC/L2ARC

The ARC is the ZFS file cache. It is logically split in two parts, the ARC and the L2ARC. The ARC is the in memory file cache, while the L2ARC is an optional on disk cache that stores items that are evicted from the ARC. The L2ARC is especially interesting with MySQL because it allows the use of a small flash storage device as a cache for a large slow storage device. Functionally, the ARC is like the InnoDB buffer pool while the L2ARC is similar to tools like flashcache/bcache/dm-cache.

RAID

ZFS has its own way of dealing with disk. At the lowest level, ZFS can use the bare disks individually with no redundancy, a bit like JBOD devices used with LVM. Redundancy can be added with a mirror which is essentially a software RAID-1 device. These mirrors can then be striped together to form the equivalent of a RAID-10 array. Going further, there are RAIDZ-1, RAIDZ-2 and RAIDZ-3 which are respectively the equivalent of RAID-5, RAID-6 and RAID… Well, an array with 3 parities has no standard name yet. When you build a RAID array with Linux MD, you could have the RAID-5+ write hole issue if you do not have a write journal. The write journal option is available only in recent kernels and with the latest mdadm packages. ZFS is not affected by the RAID-5 write hole.

Self-healing

I already touched on this feature when I talked about the checksums. If more than one copy of a record is available and one of the copies is found to be corrupted, ZFS will return only a valid copy and will repair the damaged record. You can trigger a full check with the

scrub

command.

ZVOL block devices

Not only can ZFS manage filesystems, it can also offer block devices. The block devices, called ZVOLs, can be snapshotted and cloned. That’s a very handy feature when I want to create a cluster of similar VMs. I create a base image and then snaphot and create clones for all the VMs. The whole image is stored only once, and each clone contains only the records that have been modified since the original clone was created.

Send/Receive

ZFS allows you to send and receive snapshots. This feature is very useful to send data between servers. If there is already a copy of the data on the remote server, you can also send only the incremental changes.

Deduplication

ZFS can automatically hardlink together files (or records) that have identical content. Although interesting, if you have a lot of redundant data, the dedup feature is very intensive. I don’t see a practical use case of dedup for databases except maybe for a backup server.

This concludes this first post about ZFS, stay tuned for more.