Fix for Debian/InnoDB Problem

Posted by Monty Taylor on January 28, 2009 at 04:09 PM

Baron was just writing about problems with the Debian init scripts. The basic problem boils down to /etc/mysql/debian-start running mysqlcheck on every table.

Kolbe Kolbe and Harrison Fisk pointed this  out to me last February, and as a result I re-wrote the debian-start.inc script to only operate on MyISAM tables. Additionally, the default config was changed to turn on the myisam-recover option, so even for the MyISAM tables, all we do is touch the table to get MySQL to recover it if needed. (Which I promise you, you really want if you're modifying MyISAM tables on a production server. Don't do that, really, but that's another issue.) The new process essentiall looks like this:

for table in `select TABLE_NAME from information_schema.TABLES where ENGINE='MyISAM'":
  select count(*) into @discard from TABLE_NAME

If the table is MyISAM and is not damaged, the select count(*) will be very, very quick and not noticable. If even this is too much, then just remove the myisam-recover entry from your /etc/mysql/my.cnf file, and the debian-start script should be essentially a no-op.

So while I obviously agree with Baron here about the root problem, I'd suggest that rather than disabling the debian-start script, you upgrade to a recent version of it.  If it's still a problem, ping me and we can talk about improving the script.

2 Comments

  1. [1]   Baron
    January 29, 2009 at 06:03 AM

    On servers with lots of tables, selecting anything from information_schema.tables is also a really good way to take the server down. I suggest not doing that.

  2. [2]   Monty Taylor
    January 29, 2009 at 11:39 AM

    Yeah... that information schema sucks in those cases is quite unfortunate and worth much more ranting. Still though - even the suck-ass performance of I_S on those systems is going to be _FAR_ less bad than running mysqlcheck on every table, I'd think.
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