Memory allocation in Stored Function

August 26, 2007
Author
Vadim Tkachenko
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UPDATE : Post is not actual anymore

Not so long time ago I had task to update string column in table with 10mil+ rows, and, as the manipulation was non-trivial, I decided this task is good to try Stored Function. Function written – go ahead. Since 5 min I got totally frozen box with no free memory and giant swap.

The case was worth to look deeply – let’s try simple table (experiments with MySQL 5.0.45)

and simple function I’ve found in MySQL manual:

Originally I used UPDATE statement, but for avoiding I/O and allocating os cashes let’s check only select:

and here is vmstat 5 output:

As you see MySQL ate 5GB of memory in 85 sec. That makes things clearer. As I understand MySQL allocates memory in each call of Stored Function, but de-allocates it only at the end of statement. This makes usage of Stored Function very limited from my point of view. And, yes, if you are looking for a way to DoS attack of your hosting provider – this is worth to try.

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Enough.

Said no pioneer ever.
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