Your indexes are fine for the two types of queries you mentioned.
This query will be satisfied by traversing the clustered index on the primary key...
[...] WHERE participant_id = x AND question_id = y AND given_answer_id = z;
...and this one is satisfied by the index on 'question_id':
[...] WHERE question_id = x;
The output of EXPLAIN SELECT
is not telling you what you think it is telling you, because the value shown in rows
is an estimate of the number of rows the server will need to consider, not the actual rows it will examine. For InnoDB
these are based on index statistics.
rows
The rows column indicates the number of rows MySQL believes it must examine to execute the query.
For InnoDB tables, this number is an estimate, and may not always be exact.
— http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/explain-output.html#explain_rows
The optimizer gathers information about different possible query plans, and chooses the one with the lowest cost. The information shown in EXPLAIN
is the information the optimizer gathered about the plan it selected.
When type
is ref
and key
is not NULL
, this means that the name listed in the key
column is the name of the index that the optimizer has chosen to use to find the desired rows, so your query plan looks exactly as it should.
Note, sometimes you will see Using index
in the Extra
column and a lot of people assume that this means an index is being used, or that no index is being used when that doesn't appear, but that's not correct, either. Using index
describes a special case called a "covering index" -- it does not indicate whether an index is being used to locate the rows of interest.
It's possible that running ANALYZE [LOCAL] TABLE
would cause the numbers in rows
shown by EXPLAIN
to differ, but this is a simple query and selecting this index is an obvious choice for the optimizer to make, so ANALYZE TABLE
is unlikely to make any actual difference in performance.
It is possible, however, that your overall performance might see some marginal improvement with an occasional OPTIMIZE [LOCAL] TABLE
, because you are not inserting rows in primary key order (as would be the case with an auto_increment
primary key)... but on large tables this can be time-consuming because it rebuilds a new copy of the table... but, again, I wouldn't expect any significant change.
YOUR QUERY
SELECT post.postid, post.attach FROM newbb_innopost AS post WHERE post.threadid = 51506;
At first glance, that query should only touches 1.1597% (62510 out of 5390146) of the table. It should be fast given the key distribution of threadid 51506.
REALITY CHECK
No matter which version of MySQL (Oracle, Percona, MariaDB) you use, none of them can fight to one enemy they all have in common : The InnoDB Architecture.
CLUSTERED INDEX
Please keep in mind that the each threadid entry has a primary key attached. This means that when you read from the index, it must do a primary key lookup within the ClusteredIndex (internally named gen_clust_index). In the ClusteredIndex, each InnoDB page contains both data and PRIMARY KEY index info. See my post Best of MyISAM and InnoDB for more info.
REDUNDANT INDEXES
You have a lot of clutter in the table because some indexes have the same leading columns. MySQL and InnoDB has to navigate through the index clutter to get to needed BTREE nodes. You should reduced that clutter by running the following:
ALTER TABLE newbb_innopost
DROP INDEX threadid,
DROP INDEX threadid_2,
DROP INDEX threadid_visible_dateline,
ADD INDEX threadid_visible_dateline_index (`threadid`,`visible`,`dateline`,`userid`)
;
Why strip down these indexes ?
- The first three indexes start with threadid
threadid_2
and threadid_visible_dateline
start with the same three columns
threadid_visible_dateline
does not need postid since it's the PRIMARY KEY and it's embedded
BUFFER CACHING
The InnoDB Buffer Pool caches data and index pages. MyISAM only caches index pages.
Just in this area alone, MyISAM does not waste time caching data. That's because it's not designed to cache data. InnoDB caches every data page and index page (and its grandmother) it touches. If your InnoDB Buffer Pool is too small, you could be caching pages, invalidating pages, and removing pages all in one query.
TABLE LAYOUT
You could shave of some space from the row by considering importthreadid
and importpostid
. You have them as BIGINTs. They take up 16 bytes in the ClusteredIndex per row.
You should run this
SELECT importthreadid,importpostid FROM newbb_innopost PROCEDURE ANALYSE();
This will recommend what data types these columns should be for the given dataset.
CONCLUSION
MyISAM has a lot less to contend with than InnoDB, especially in the area of caching.
While you revealed the amount of RAM (32GB
) and the version of MySQL (Server version: 10.0.12-MariaDB-1~trusty-wsrep-log mariadb.org binary distribution, wsrep_25.10.r4002
), there are still other pieces to this puzzle you have not revealed
- The InnoDB settings
- The Number of Cores
- Other settings from
my.cnf
If you can add these things to the question, I can further elaborate.
UPDATE 2014-08-28 11:27 EDT
You should increase threading
innodb_read_io_threads = 64
innodb_write_io_threads = 16
innodb_log_buffer_size = 256M
I would consider disabling the query cache (See my recent post Why query_cache_type is disabled by default start from MySQL 5.6?)
query_cache_size = 0
I would preserve the Buffer Pool
innodb_buffer_pool_dump_at_shutdown=1
innodb_buffer_pool_load_at_startup=1
Increase purge threads (if you do DML on multiple tables)
innodb_purge_threads = 4
GIVE IT A TRY !!!
Best Answer
You seem to have an issue with key distribution with
id
and the Query Optimizer.Since the
id
is not being factored into the partitioning scheme, I only see MySQL having to look up theid
up to 6 times. Depending on when and how frequent eachid
value is written, the query could be using the wrong index.There are two things you could do to see if
id
key distribution is at issueSUGGESTION #1 : Run
EXPLAIN
on each queryThe output will tell you what index was chosen to scan for rows. If the
clock
index is being used, then theclock
is being scanned in the index, but theid
is being scanned from the table.SUGGESTION #2 : Change the
ORDER BY
If the
order by clock desc
is making the Query Optimizer choose theclock
index, try this:That way, the scan will be from
table_1
index, starting from the last time anid
was inserted.GIVE IT A TRY !!!