It makes sense that most of the memory not used by apps would be used by the OS to improve disk access.  So seeing the memory graphs filled with orange is generally a good thing.  After a few days, I watched the orange area grow and thought, “Great!  LInux is putting all that extra memory to use.”  I thought in my head that maybe it was caching images and CSS files to serve to Apache.  But was that true?

Looking At A Different Server

Here is a memory graph from one of our database servers after the RAM upgrade.

Again, I first thought that the OS was caching all that juicy database data from disk.  The problem is that we don’t have 12GB of data, and that step pattern growth was suspiciously consistent.

Looking again at the web server graph, I saw giant downward spikes of blue color, where the buffer cache was emptied.  (The blue is unused memory.)  These occurred every day at 4 am, and on Sundays there’s a huge one.  What happens every day at 4 am?  The logs are rotated.  And on Sundays, the granddaddy log of them all – the Apache log – is rotated.

The Problem

It was starting to make sense.  Log files seem to take up most of the OS buffer cache on the web servers.  Not optimal, I’m sure.  And when they’re rotated, the data in the cache is invalidated and thus freed.

Here is a memory graph for one of our other database servers.

That step pattern growth is missing!  In fact, most of RAM is unused.  What is the difference between the first database server and this one?  The first has the `mysqldump` backup.  It occurs every night at 2:30 am, right when those step changes occur on its memory usage graph.

It was clear to me that most of the OS buffer cache was wasted on logs and backups and such.  There had to be a way to tell the OS not to cache a file. 

The Solution

Google gave me this page: Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State.  I copied the little C program into a file and ran it on all the `mysqldump` backups.  Here is the what happened to the memory usage.

Quite a bit of buffer cache was freed.  On that night’s backup, I logged the buffer cache size before the backup and after.

% cat 2008.08.21.02.30.log
Starting at Thu Aug 21 02:30:03 EDT 2008
=========================================
Cached:        4490232 kB
Cached:        5350908 kB
=========================================
Ending at Thu Aug 21 02:30:55 EDT 2008

Just under a gigabyte increase in buffer cache size.  What was the size of the new backup file?

% ll 2008.08.21.02.30.sql
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 879727872 Aug 21 02:30 2008.08.21.02.30.sql

About 900MB.

Did It Work?

I used the C program on that page to ensure no database backups were cached by the OS.  I did the same on the web servers in the logrotate config files.  A couple days later, I checked the memory graph on the database server that performed the backup.  Notice how the buffer cache did not fill up.  It looked like the program worked, and the OS was free to cache more important things.

1

$sql = "select event_id from events where event_dt >= curdate()";

Because MySQL knows that this query run today is not the same query when it is run tomorrow. There are other SQL functions such as rand() and unix_timestamp() that will bypass the query cache. These are listed here.

So I avoid these functions when possible by calculating the value in PHP. For example, I’d rewrite the above query as:

1
2

$date = date('Y-m-d');
$sql = "select event_id from events where event_dt >= '$date'";

I’ll spare you the problems I ran into and overcame, and just list the steps to get this done.  These instructions are based on a 64-bit, RHEL 5 server running the pre-packaged Apache server.  So if you follow these instructions on a different setup, of course, filenames, directories, versions, etc. may differ.

Install mod_vhost_dbd

Download dbd-modules from Google Code.  This is a great piece of code in the form of an Apache module that uses mod_dbd and a DBD Mysql (or other database) driver to fetch the DocumentRoot for a given domain from a database.

% wget http://dbd-modules.googlecode.com/files/dbd-modules-1.0.5.zip

Unzip the archive in a directory. As indicated on the website, build and install the module.

% apxs -c mod_vhost_dbd.c
% apxs -i mod_vhost_dbd.la

This places mod_vhost_dbd.so in /usr/lib64/httpd/modules.  Enable both this module and mod_dbd by adding two lines to httpd.conf, or equivalently creating a new include file in /etc/httpd/conf.d containing these lines.

LoadModule dbd_module modules/mod_dbd.so
LoadModule vhost_dbd_module modules/mod_vhost_dbd.so

In true unit fashion, now might be a good time to restart Apache, just so you can be sure everything is working up to this point.

% service httpd restart

Install Mysql DBD Driver to APR

Unfortunately, on my system, the Mysql DBD driver was nowhere to be found.  I had to rebuild Apache Portable Runtime (APR) utils with the Mysql driver enabled.

Download apr and apr-util from Apache.  Note these are not the latest versions, but the versions that matched the packages in worked for RHEL 5.

% wget http://archive.apache.org/dist/apr-1.2.8.tar.bz2
% wget http://archive.apache.org/dist/apr-util-1.2.8.tar.bz2

Unpack and untar these archives in the same parent directory.

Build and install APR.  Now, I do not think this is absolutely necessary, but it seems like a good idea to keep the versions in sync.

% ./configure --prefix=/usr
% make
% make install

Build and install apr-util.  Due to licensing issues, apr-util does not actually contain the Mysql DBD driver until apr-util-1.2.12.  Prior to that version, it must be downloaded separately, and the configure script rebuilt.

% wget http://apache.webthing.com/svn/apache/apr/apr_dbd_mysql.c
% ./buildconf --with-apr=../apr-1.2.7

Now for the three commands every Linux admin loves.

% ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-apr=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --with-expat=builtin --with-ldap-include=/usr/include --with-ldap-lib=/usr/lib64 --with-ldap=ldap --with-mysql
% make
% make install

The first time I tried this, Apache could not find any LDAP-related modules.  Adding those configure switches seemed to do the trick.  Restart Apache.

% service httpd restart

Apache should now be able to query a Mysql database to get the DocumentRoot for a domain.  My VirtualHost block looked something like this.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName *.example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/default/document/root"
 
    DBDriver mysql
    DBDParams host=localhost,user=root,pass=secret,dbname=vhosts
 
    DBDocRoot "SELECT path FROM vhosts WHERE host = %s"  HOSTNAME
</VirtualHost>

For more details and instructions on mod_vhost_dbd configuration directives, read the project wiki.

But there are three problems with that logic.

1. How often are you going to switch databases in the life of your application anyway? I don’t know if I’ve ever switched a database out from under an application. Ever.
2. To achieve true database independence, you’ll need to avoid using all the little syntax nuances that vary from DB to DB (e.g. the MySQL LIMIT clause) and avoid any feature in that database that makes it interesting (e.g. say goodbye to ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE). Chances are, you haven’t done these things. So to switch databases, your biggest problem will not be having to change all the mysql_* calls to ora_* or whatever.
3. As with any layer, when you add another layer, there will always be some performance impact.

In light of these reasons, database dependence can be a good thing. You can take advantage of features in the RDBMS. And if you can make native calls directly to the extension, you’re saving a lot of code from being executed.

But still, something feels wrong from having all those native function calls throughout the codebase. The solution is database access abstraction, which does not attempt to abstract away the entire database, but attempts to abstract away access to the database.

Practically, this means building a wrapper class around your database code.  Then, your application can use this wrapper class for its database needs. This is somewhat the best of both worlds. If you do need to switch DB’s, all your native functions calls will at least be in one file. You can also insert any system-wide logic pertaining to DB’s in this one class. For example, if you move to a replicated MySQL environment, you’ll need to direct READ queries to connect to one of multiple slave servers, and direct WRITE queries to the master server.  This seems like an obvious thing to do, but a lot of people assume using a DBAL is enough abstraction already.

At work, my biggest motivation was performance. Running tests on our current DBAL, ADOdb, against using the mysqli_* functions in PHP revealed significant performance gains in going without the DBAL, which makes sense.

This blog repeats much of the thinking here, but is a more comprehensive looks at the topic (though the language is confusing at times.)

SELECT event_name FROM events WHERE event_id = 8;

is different from this query:

SELECT  event_name FROM events WHERE event_id = 10;

Important note!  This means that even though your parameterized queries may look the same without the parameters, to the query cache, they are not!

As with all caches, the query cache is concerned about freshness of data. It takes perhaps the simplest approach possible to this problem by keeping track of any tables involved in your cached query. If any of these tables changes, it invalidates the query and removes it from the cache. This means that if your query returns frequently-changing data in its results, the query cache will invalidate the query frequently, leading to thrashing. For example, if you had a query that returned a view count of an event:

SELECT event_name, views FROM events WHERE event_id = 8;

Every time that event is viewed, the cached query will be invalidated. What’s the solution?

In general, write queries so that their result sets do not change often. In specific, mixing static attributes with frequently updated fields in a single table leads to thrashing, so separate out things like view counts and analytics into their own tables. The frequently updated data can be read with a separate query, or perhaps cached in your application in a data structure that periodically flushes to the DB.

This vertical partitioning of a single table’s columns into multiple tables helps immensely with the query cache. What’s more is that the table with the unchanging data can be further optimized for READS, and the frequently updated table can be optimized for UPDATES.

So instead of this:

$num = $db->getone("select count(*) from events where event_id = 15");
 
if ($num > 0)
{
   $sql = "update events set name = 'New name' where event_id = 15";
}
else
{
   $sql = "insert into events (event_id, name) values (null, 'New name')";
}

you can do something like this:

$id = (empty($_POST['id'])) ? null : $_POST['id'];
$sql = "insert into events (event_id, name) values ($id, 'New name') on duplicate key update name = 'New name'";

Neat, eh?

In case you’re wondering what the difference is between ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE and a REPLACE query, a REPLACE fires a DELETE followed by an INSERT query, as opposed to a real UPDATE.