Mysql, Site Updates | featured news

A while back, My ISP told me my backups took half a day to complete, which is too long. If anything goes wrong during that period, the process would have to start all over again, which happened quite often.

The customer rep told me that my server had too many files, and even though they didn’t take up much disk space when added up, the process of copying each one of them takes a lot of time.

You had probably noticed that the site was down for a couple hours on Monday and hadn’t been updated until this morning. I was on my way to the airport for Cannes and, of course, the site had to go down. It’s not my fault though. There server crapped out because of hardware issues, and my site had to be moved to another one. That took about three hours. Well, actually, it only took about half an hour, but I didn’t know the site was down and out until two and half hours later.

The site crashed yesterday morning at around 9am, although it’s hardly noticable until a couple hours later. I didn’t notice it until I started picking stories to feature on the homepage. Whenever i tried to feature an article, it would stop the site from loading up.

From that, I knew that the MySQL database must be checking for corrupt tables. And if it’s doing that, a crash must have occurred. Checking out stats at my ISP confirmed that the server was restarted at 9am.

I spent the whole day dealing with servers. The facility where Wopular and MoviesWithButter are hosted were having some network issues. I was able to get MWB up and running within an hour or so. Wopular was a whole different story. The Database is about 21GB. It's a huge db, so whenever there's a network issue, I can always count on at least one corrupt table. And it always happens to be the largest table, which takes several hours to diagnose and repair.

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.

In my continued efforts to make the site run faster, I’ve set my sights on query caching on MySQL. I think query caching is turned on by default when you install MySQL. At least for me, I didn’t have to do anything. I notice it’s been working because whenever I run a query a second time, it’s always significantly faster.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.