Mysql – Calculating time spent on query cache lock

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How can I calculate the total time my MySQL database is spending Waiting for query cache lock ?

I've found two specific very simple tables that adding a SQL_NO_CACHE drastically improved the SELECT queries on them, and I want to analyze other tables in a more methodological approach.

My MySQL version is 5.5.15 and the InnoDB engine is 1.1.8
Query cache size is 536870912

Relevant Variables:
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Best Answer

Half a gigabyte is too large for the query cache. This write-up is several years old but still very applicable:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/03/23/beware-large-query_cache-sizes/

In MySQL 5.5., you can benchmark this using profiling but the real problem isn't how long any particular query waits for the lock, because the answers will generally be all across the board and largely unrelated to the query itself or the tables, because the query cache is accessed by a global mutex that every query contends for.

There is apparently supposed to be a timeout to prevent long waits, but which does not work correctly, according to Bug #68573.

Your fix would be a more reasonable query cache.

I dissected and described a little bit of the query cache's inner workings here.

Related Solutions

Mysql – Why do MySQL threads often show “freeing items” status when the query cache is disabled

Check the value of innodb_thread_concurrency.

For my system increasing the value from 8 to 32, per the guidelines in the MySql documentation, caused a discernible decrease in the number of threads concurrently reporting the "freeing items" state. Also, the obesrved average query time dropped by an order of magnitude.

While this made a large difference in overall server performance, it was not the "freeing items" silver bullet. My hardware ecosystem leads me to hypothesize that this state is mostly seen on systems with "slow" disks (2x10k disks raid 1), and is less prevalent on systems with faster storage (12x15k disks raid 10). So, a check of disk performance may also be warranted.

Good Luck!

Also:

It is worth noting that the default value of innodb_thread_concurrency is radically different depending on what 5.0 point release is being used.

The default value has changed several times: 8 before MySQL 5.0.8, 20 (infinite) from 5.0.8 through 5.0.18, 0 (infinite) from 5.0.19 to 5.0.20, and 8 (finite) from 5.0.21 on. -- source

This means that a seemingly innocuous upgrade from 5.0.20 to 5.0.21 changed the default from infinite to 8, and brought along with it the performance ramifications.

Mysql – Is the overhead of frequent query cache invalidation ever worth it

You should just disable the query cache with

[mysqld]
query_cache_size = 0

and then restart mysql. Why would I suggest that ???

The Query Cache will always butt heads with InnoDB. It would be nice if InnoDB's MVCC would let queries be served from the query cache if modifications do not affect repeatable reads for other transactions. Unfortunately, InnoDB just does not do that. Apparently, you have a lot of queries that get invalidated rather quickly and are probably not being reused.

For InnoDB under MySQL 4.0, the query cache was disabled for transactions. For MySQL 4.1+, InnoDB plays traffic cop when allowing access to the query cache on a per-table basis.

From the perspective of your question, I would say that the justification of removing the query cache is not so much the overhead, but how InnoDB manages it.

For more information on how InnoDB interacts with the query cache, please read pages 213-215 of the book "High Performance MySQL (Second Edition)".

If all or the majority of your data is MyISAM, you could go with your original idea of using SQL_NO_CACHE.

If you have a mix of InnoDB and MyISAM, you will have to find the right balance for your application based on on how high your cache misses are. In fact, pages 209-210 of the same book point out reasons for cache misses :

The query is not cacheable, either because it contains a nondeterministic construct (such as CURRENT_DATE) or because its result set is too large to store.Both types of uncacheable queries increment the Qcache_not_cached status variable.

The server has never seen the query before, so it never had the chance to cache its result.

The query's result was previously cached, but the server removed it. This can happen because there wasn't enough memory to keep it, because someone instructed the server to remove it, or because it was invalidated

and the root causes of high cache misses with few uncacheable queries may be :

The query cache is not warm yet. That is the server hasn't had a chance to fill the cache with result sets.

The server is seeing queries it hasn't seen before. If you do not have a lot of repeated queries, this can happen even after the cache is warmed up.

There are a lot of cache invalidations.

UPDATE 2012-09-06 10:10 EDT

Looking your latest updated info, you have query_cache_limit set to 1048576 (1M). This limits any result set to 1M. If you retrieve anything bigger, it will simply not be cached. While you have have query_cache_size set to 104857600 (100M), this only allows for 100 cached results set in a perfect world. If you perform hundreds of queries, fragmentation will come about rather quickly. You also have 4096 (4K) as the minimum size result set. Unfortunately, mysql has no internal mechanism for defragmenting the query cache.

If you must have the query cache and you have so much RAM, you could execute the following:

SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 0;
SELECT SLEEP(60);
SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 1024 * 1024 * 1024;

in order to purge the query cache. You lose all cached results, so run these lines during off-peak hours.

I would also assign the following:

query_cache_size = 1G
query_cache_limit = 8M

That leaves 23G of RAM. I would raise the following:

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 12G
key_buffer_size = 4G

That leaves 7G. This should be adequate for OS and DB Connections.

Keep in mind that the key buffer caches only MyISAM index pages, while the InnoDB Buffer Pool caches data and indexes.

One more recommendation: upgrade to MySQL 5.5 so you can configure InnoDB for multiple CPU and multiple threads for read/write I/O.

See my earlier posts on using MySQL 5.5 in conjunction with accessing multiple CPUs for InnoDB

Nov 24, 2011 : Why mysql 5.5 slower than 5.1 (linux,using mysqlslap)
Oct 05, 2011 : Query runs a long time in some newer MySQL versions
Sep 20, 2011 : Multi cores and MySQL Performance
Jun 19, 2011 : How do I properly perform a MySQL bake-off?

UPDATE 2012-09-06 14:56 EDT

My method for clearing the query cache is rather extreme because it hoses cached data and forms a completely different segment of RAM. As you did point out in your comment, FLUSH QUERY CACHE (as you suggested) or even RESET QUERY CACHE would be better. For clarification, when I said "no internal mechanism," I meant exactly that. Defragmentation is needed and has to be done manually. It would need to be crontab'd.

If you do DML (INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs) on InnoDB more often than on MyISAM, I would say remove the query cache altogether, which I said in the beginning.