MySql install Parameters

When installing MySQL to use with Ignition, are there any install parameters that are important… to make sure it communicates effectively with Ignition?

I’m not aware of anything in particular to Ignition. In general you’ll want to follow some basic tunings for a stock mysql instance. Some of this depends if you’re using innodb or myiasm.

Key Buffer
The key buffer holds the indexes of tables in memory and a bigger key buffer results in faster row lookups. Adjust according to your own needs. Bigger is better, but prevent swapping at all costs. A good rule of thumb seems to be to use 1/4 of system memory.

Query Cache
This is where the magic happens. Well, not magic really, just plain old caching. Keeping the result of queries in memory until they are invalidated by additional writes enhances performance by magnitudes. The query_cache_size, as the name suggests, is the total size of memory available to query caching. The value query_cache_limit is the maximum number of kilobytes one query may be in order to be cached. Setting this value too high might prevent a lot of smaller queries to be cached. Setting it too low will result in bigger queries to never be cached, and the smaller queries not being able to completely fill the cache size, which would be a waste of resources.

Sort Buffers
sort_buffer_sizeor myisam_sort_buffer_size, used for grouping and sorting and is a per-thread buffer. If the buffer can not hold the data to be sorted, a sort is performed on disk. Watch out for making this too large as the buffer is allocated for every thread that needs sorting and with many sorts it can easily consume all your memory.

Binary Logging
MySQL has a few powerful features. Replicating data changes to a second server is one of them. MySQL keeps a log file of data changes which is used for this purpose. If you do not use replication or use the file as incremental backup, you can disable it. This will save you expensive disk write actions for every change to your data. For applications that have a lot of frequently updated data, this can be quite a performance boost. According to the official docs, this will generally result in just a 1% boost but it’s an easy gain if you do not need the log. Read more about the binary log here. Comment the following line:

log-bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log

Temporary Tables
Temporary tables are used for sorting and grouping. The buffer is created on demand so watch out for setting this too high here as well. If the buffer cannot accomodate the data, a temp file is used on disk instead.

Thanks a million for your help on fine tuning it.

I was sort of wondering on the questions it asks during install. If I just use typical and the defaults or I should change anything at that time.