We recently released XtraDB-9, and while we did not highlight it in announcement, the release-making feature is ability to save and restore InnoDB buffer pool.
The idea is not new and was originally developed by Jeremy Cole (sorry, I do not have the link on hands) some time ago, and now we implemented it in XtraDB.
Why would we need to save and restore content of buffer pool ?
There are several reasons.
First, it’s not rate on modern servers to have 32GB+ of RAM, with allocated InnoDB buffer_pool 26GB or more. When you do restart of server, it may take long time to populate cache with useful data before you can bring it back to serve production load. It’s not rare to see
maintenance cycle takes two or more hours, mainly because the slave need to catchup with master and to warm cache.
In case with the server crash, it is even worse, you need to wait possible long time on InnoDB
recovery (we have the patch for that too, in that post you can see InnoDB recovery took 1h to accomplish) and after that warm caches.
Second, it is useful for some HA schemas, like DRBD, when, in case of failover, you need to start passive instance on cold.
So let’s see what results we have.
Details about patch you can get there https://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/percona-xtradb:patch:innodb_lru_dump_restore (Yasufumi names it LRU dump/restore, because he thinks about buffer pool as about LRU list, which how it is internally).
To save buffer pool you execute
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select * from information_schema.XTRADB_ADMIN_COMMAND /*!XTRA_LRU_DUMP*/;<br> |
and to restore
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select * from information_schema.XTRADB_ADMIN_COMMAND /*!XTRA_LRU_RESTORE*/;<br> |
it will create/read file
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ib_lru_dump |
from your database directory.
You may want to sort ib_lru_dump in order of pages in tablespaces, so RESTORE will be
performed in most sequential way. The small python script
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lrusort.py |
to sort
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ib_lru_dump |
is available
in our Launchpad branch
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lp:~percona-dev/percona-xtradb/extensions-1.0.6 |
I made small tpcc benchmark to show effect with restored buffer_pool (the condition of
benchmarks are the same as in my runs on fast storages, and I
used RAID10 to store InnoDB files).
First run (xtradb cold) I made just after restart and ran it for 1h.
After that I saved buffer_pool, restarted mysqld, restored buffer_pool ( it took about 4 min
to load 26GB worth of data), and run (xtradb warm) tpcc again.
Here is graphical results (results in New Transactions Per 10 sec, more is better):
As you see in the cold run it took 1500-1800 sec to enter into stable mode, while
it warm run it happened almost from start. There was some period of unstable results, but it
did not affect ability to serve load.
You are welcome to test it, it is available in XtraDB-9 release and also in MariaDB 5.1.41-RC.
