This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from January 19th to 25th, 2009.

Wading through heaps of Mozilla email and feeds last week paid off this week. Instead of worrying about what I hadn't read or wondering where I was duplicating other's work, I was able to focus on program development with most of my effort going into developing the Mozilla Social Movement Program Concept, working on the

Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance.

It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are a few reasons why this happens -- access to open an InnoDB table is serialized by a mutex, for one thing, and the mysqlcheck script opens all tables. One at a time.

It's pretty easy to get into a "perfect storm" scenario. For example, I'm working with one client right now who has a hosted multi-tenanting application that keeps each customer in its own database. So they have a lot of databases and a lot of tables. And they're running on Amazon EC2 with 8G of RAM and EBS storage, which is slower

I’ll keep this short. Let’s say you run “mysql> show slave status\G” and you see the following error:

Last_Error: Error 'Unknown or incorrect time zone: 'Etc/UTC'' on query. Default database: 'db_name'. Query: 'INSERT INTO table SET column = CONVERT_TZ('2009-01-24', '-8:00', '+00:00')'

It’s a simple fix. Exit out of MySQL and run the following command - this works on Redhat, I’ve not tried it on other flavors.

shell> mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo|mysql -u root -p

Log back into MySQL and run the following.

mysql> stop slave;
mysql> start slave;
mysql> show slave status\G;

The error should be gone and the slave should be catching up to the master now. Problem solved.

This is a simple mysql circular replication implementation on a single machine (just a proof of concept) which can easily be done on a broader scale. Just be aware of the cons of circular replication which mainly gets down to: once a node freaks out or stops for one reason or the other, it’s a bitch and you need to take care of IMMEDIATELY.

Download Sandbox from https://launchpad.net/mysql-sandbox/+download
Download MySQL from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads

Copy the downloaded software onto the your *nix box onto any folder of your preference called $BASEDIR

run:

cd /$BASEDIR

gunzip mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar.gz
tar -xf mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX.tar

ln -s mysql_sandbox_X.X.XX sandbox

time /$BASEDIR/sandbox/make_replication_sandbox –circular=4 –topology=circular