A few thoughts:
* If you're not already using memcached with a big RAM allocation as an in-memory cache, I strongly recommend it. This will reduce churn on the 'objectcache' table in MySQL for things like localization caches and the parser cache (which may be churning a lot if you're seeing a large spike in both visits and edits).
* Consider separating MySQL out to its own VM for easier management or to split up memory usage. Watch for high i/o usage and make sure indexes are in memory... Beware that MediaWiki expects MySQL to be on the local network and makes lots of roundtrips -- make sure if you use a separate VM to locate it in the same DC at least.
* Consider setting up a read-only slave database in another VM; depending on your workload this may also help keep expensive lookups on the secondary. It's also possible to route certain kinds of queries to a particular database replica, which we use a lot on high-load Wikipedia sites. This is a little tricky but not impossible.
-- brion
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 2:11 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
rationalwiki.org is getting hammered again. It looks like MySQL is the busiest portion - seriously just doing a lot of work.
Our current arrangement is: one box for MySQL, Apache, Lucene (the latter reindexing weekly); two Squids; a load balancer. These are all virtual machines on Linode (who we like). Apache and Squid boxes are Ubuntu 12.04 servers.
The *usual* thing when we get hammered is that Reddit discovers an amusing tumbleweed article. The squids take care of this, of course. But then something like the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate happens, we score pretty highly in Google for skeptical material and a wide variety of articles gets hit and MySQL has to work for a living.
So, what's a good approach to scaling up MySQL on a VM? Add more memory? Add more cores? (How's MySQL 5.5-ubuntu do for multicore?) We can trivially add more Squids, and we haven't doubled up on Apache but shirley that won't be entirely unfeasible.
- d.
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