All the MySQL-related news
MySQL 5.0.77 packages are now available on Dotdeb for Debian Etch amd64/i386.
This is a maintenance release that fix some annoying bugs and a severe security issue.
Please read the official list of changes in 5.0.77 before upgrading.
MySQL 5.1.31 is now available on Dotdeb for Etch amd64/i386. It fixes several problems and brings many enhancement to the previous release.
Please read the official Changelog before upgrading.
MySQL AB has just made MySQL 5.0.75 available. Even it is just a maintenance release – since the 5.1 branch is now golden – it is now packaged and uploaded to Dotdeb for Etch amd64/i386.
Anyway, if you did not make the jump and still use MySQL 5.0, please upgrade your server, to fix some annoying bugs, fill up some security holes and enhance the overall security of your favorite SGDB. And don’t forget to take a look at the release notes of MySQL 5.0.75.
MySQL, the most popular open source database, releases on November 27, 2008, its version 5.1 GA (General Availability). It is now available on Dotdeb for Etch (amd64/i386)!
Version 5.1 introduces several enhancements to the already rich set of features. Most notable are partitioning, row based replication, the event scheduler, a new plugin infrastructure, and logs on demand.
There are more new features, but the general improvement is better performance and manageability. Many users have already adopted MySQL 5.1 in production. Their feedback has been reported in the MySQL technical articles. Check them out. MySQL 5.1 is ready for prime time!
The Google Perftools, especially tcmalloc (Thread Caching Malloc), can be very useful to speed up your applications, depending on your environment :
TCMalloc is faster than the glibc 2.3 malloc (available as a separate library called ptmalloc2) and other mallocs that I have tested. ptmalloc2 takes approximately 300 nanoseconds to execute a malloc/free pair on a 2.8 GHz P4 (for small objects). The TCMalloc implementation takes approximately 50 nanoseconds for the same operation pair.
Its deployment in your LAMP stack can speed up your MySQL servers, since it enhances memory allocation on threaded applications with the downside of larger memory footprints.
Here is how to use it easily…
Installation
First of all, be sure you use Debian 5.0 (a.k.a. “Lenny”) or later. Then install the minimal tcmalloc library from Dotdeb :
apt-get install libtcmalloc-minimal0 |
Then, since the mainstream MySQL packages are not compiled against tcmalloc, you’ll have to trick your OS’ dynamic linker by adding the following line at the top of your /etc/init.d/mysql init script :
export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.0" |
After relauching your MySQL server using the modified init script, you’ll take profit from tcmalloc’s faster memory allocation.
Results
At the time of writing this article, I didn’t make benchmarks, but some reported that they had a ~15-20% performance gain. Please leave comments about your experience.
Norbert Tretkowski recently worked on packaging MySQL 5.0.67, the latest Community Edition release of MySQL Server. But, since the next Debian version – Lenny – is already frozen, the packages were not uploaded to the official archive.
Instead of that, I rebuilt them and made them available on Dotdeb for Etch amd64/i386.
Please take a look at the official Changelog before upgrading and thank Norbert for his good work.