MariaDB/pt-heartbeat

pt-heartbeat is a service running on MariaDB servers acting as masters. A process on the source server writes a timestamped row to the heartbeat table every second. A process on a replica compares the most recent entry in the table to the host clock to evaluate the replication lag. MediaWiki load-balancer will avoid replicas that don't have an up-to-date heartbeat entry.

The process writes to a database called heartbeat that contains a table called also heartbeat which has the following structure:

CREATE TABLE `heartbeat` (
 `ts` varbinary(26) NOT NULL,
 `server_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
 `file` varbinary(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `position` bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
 `relay_master_log_file` varbinary(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `exec_master_log_pos` bigint(20) unsigned DEFAULT NULL,
 `shard` varbinary(10) DEFAULT NULL,
 `datacenter` binary(5) DEFAULT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`server_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=binary

The process is controlled by pt-heartbeat-wikimedia.service systemctl unit and can be stopped and started as follows:

systemctl start pt-heartbeat-wikimedia.service
systemctl stop pt-heartbeat-wikimedia.service

The [upstream version] is developed by Percona, we use a modified version (pt-heartbeat-wikimedia).

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