Hi George,

My understanding is that the database max_connections is something that should be tuned in relation to your Apache config (and both should be tuned to the server resources available).

 

Recently we had been suffering with some performance issues.

We were hitting our Apache MaxClients – but the root cause seems to have been the database:

We were using MyISAM tables (the MySQL default when we implemented EPrints).

The following sequence of events caused us problems:

1.       Slow SELECT query (possibly from generate_views, but there were a few other possibilities – a paper with >2,500 authors…)

2.       Update on table included in above SELECT (whilst it was still running)

3.       SELECT on above table

 

MyISAM can handle parallel SELECT queries on the tables without any problem *until* you throw an UPDATE into the equation. MyISAM uses table-level locking, and the UPDATE will wait for the slow SELECT to complete, and the other SELECTs get queued behind the UPDATE.

 

If you have a MySQL session open when you hit a max_connections issue, do a:

mysql>SHOW PROCESSLIST\G

You might see a query in the ‘sending’ state (that’s been running for a while) and a lot of ‘waiting for table lock’ entries.

If you do, you may well be seeing the same issue we had.

 

We have altered our database tables to use InnoDB (which is the default MySQL engine since 5.5.5), but you’ll need to understand what you’re doing when updating it if you go down this route…

 

I posted recently on this list about a [dataset]__index tables missing a primary key – I discovered this as part of the planning to move to InnoDB.

 

Cheers,

John

 

 

 

Hello colleagues.

 

Occasionally our EPrints suffers the “too many connections” MySQL connection error.  In the past when EPrints has suffered this error my assumption has been that there is a query hanging which then has a knock on effect on other queries as they can’t write to a table.  We currently have max_connections set to 300 (which seems like a lot) but I can observe from previous chatter on the list that some go up to 1000.  I was therefore wondering what the community considered to be an appropriate connection limit?  Given all the traffic I can observe it is conceivable – however unlikely - that 300 is insufficient.  Have others observed something similar?

 

Thanks in advance!

George

 

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George Macgregor

Information Services Directorate | University of Strathclyde

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Tel: 0141 548 3496

Email: george.macgregor@strath.ac.uk

Web: http://personal.strath.ac.uk/george.macgregor/

Twitter: @g3om4c

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