MariaDB
For emergencies, check the subpage about MariaDB troubleshooting.
MariaDB is the main database management system used to run the Wikimedia sites.
For a general overview, check the MySQL@Wikipedia (2015) slides (MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, which we used to use).
Categories and clusters
Our MariaDB databases can be grouped into roughly seven main categories. The database tree and replication status for most clusters can be viewed in Orchestrator (NDA only).
category | clusters | use | steward |
---|---|---|---|
Core | s1-8 | main MediaWiki databases | SRE/Data Persistence |
External storage | es1-7 | Full content of MediaWiki page revisions | SRE/Data Persistence |
Parser cache | pc1-5 | Database component of parser cache | SRE/Data Persistence |
Extension storage | x1-2 | Cross-wiki storage generally used by MediaWiki extensions | SRE/Data Persistence |
Miscellaneous | m1-3, m5
db_inventory |
Auxiliary services such as Phabricator and VRTS | SRE/Data Persistence |
Cloud Services | — | public replicas of core (MediaWiki) databases | Cloud Services |
Data Platform | — | private replicas of core and x1 databases, backend storage for analytics tools | Data Platform Engineering |
Core (MediaWiki databases)
There are 8 clusters which host the main MediaWiki databases. Each cluster is responsible for a particular set of wikis.
The canonical list of core clusters can be viewed at noc.wikimedia.org/db.php, but here is a summary:
- s1: English Wikipedia
- s2: 17 large wikis, including Chinese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Portuguese Wikipedias and English Wiktionary
- s3: Most small wikis (~900)
- s4: Commons, Testcommons
- s5: German Wikipedia, some other large wikis, and most new wikis since mid-2020 (T259438)
- s6: French, Japanese, and Russian Wikipedias, and Wikitech
- s7: CentralAuth, Meta, 10 large Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary
- s8: Wikidata
External storage
The external storage servers host the full text of all page revisions in a compressed format.
- es1: read-only
- es2: read-only
- es3: read-only
- es4: read-only
- es5: read-only
- es6: read/write
- es7: read/write
Parser cache
The parser cache servers (clusters pc1-5) store the largest, disk-based part of the parser cache (for example, temporary parsed HTML output sent to users). While the service is very important for performance optimization, individually, and in general, rows can be lost, as they will be automatically inserted back when re-parsed, on next cache miss.
Because data loss is not a concern, but read only could cause application errors, the parser cache hosts are started by default in read-write mode (unlike most production databases), so they are writable by the application at all times.
Its topology generally follows the same structure as core clusters: they are written in the primary data center and replicated to the secondary. However, it has been proposed that they should work like x2 (local and independent in each data center) in the future.
Extension storage
x1
The x1 cluster is used by MediaWiki at WMF for databases that are "global" or "cross-wiki" in nature, and are typically associated with a MediaWiki extension. Apart from being used across wikis, it is otherwise configured, replicated, and queries in the same way as "core" databases.
Tables that don't need to join with core tables can (and should) live in x1, there is a wiki db for per-wiki tables.
Feature | Database | Phabricator project | Steward |
---|---|---|---|
BounceHandler | wikishared.bounce_*
|
||
CampaignEvents | wikishared.campaign_events , wikishared.ce_* , [wiki].campaign_events , [wiki].ce_*
|
Campaigns Product Team | |
Cognate | cognate_wiktionary.*
|
||
ContentTranslation | wikishared.cx_*
|
Language and Product Localization | |
Echo | wikishared.echo_* , and
|
Growth Team | |
Flow | flowdb.*
|
Growth Team | |
GrowthExperiments | [wiki].growthexperiments_*
|
Growth Team | |
ReadingLists | wikishared.reading_list_*
|
||
UrlShortener | wikishared.urlshortcodes
|
||
WikimediaCampaignEvents | wikishared.wikimedia_campaign_events_grant , [wiki].wikimedia_campaign_events_grant
|
Campaigns Product Team | |
WikimediaEditorTasks | wikishared.wikimedia_editor_tasks_*
|
x2
This cluster is reserved for use by the MainStash. It is read-write in all data centers and replicated in both directions.
This cluster can be visualized graphically at: https://orchestrator.wikimedia.org/web/cluster/alias/x2 (NDA needed).
The replication topology is primary-primary, meaning that eqiad primary and codfw primary, replicate from each other and they are both writable. Those clusters do not use the replicas for reads, everything goes to the primary. The replicas are there for redundancy purposes. In case of replica failure there is no need to depool anything as they aren't in use.
Like x1 and parsercache, x2 is shared by all wikis. This means that to depool the x2 primary in a secondary DC, one should depool MW from that DC in general (T315995#8258320).
These hosts use STATEMENT based replication and they have Innodb-flush-log-at-trx-commit = 0
for better performance as data consistency isn't critical.
Miscellaneous
The miscellaneous clusters host databases for various auxiliary services.
- m1: Internal SRE services and Etherpad.
- m2: VRTS, DebMonitor and others.
- m3: Phabricator and others.
- m5: Mailman, CXServer, WMCS services, and others.
- db_inventory: Orchestrator and Zarcillo.
Database creation template
If you need to request a new database please create a task with the DBA tag and filling out the following fields if you know them (or can estimate them)
- QPS:
- Size: (An estimation is fine)
- DB Name:
- User:
- Accessed from server (s):
- Backup Policy: Needed? Frequency?
- Grants needed:
Cloud Services
Replicas of the core databases with private data removed are part of the Data Services hosted by Wikimedia Cloud Services for bot, tool, and analysis use. The redaction is done during an intermediate stop on Sanitarium.
These replicas run in multiple hosts (clouddb1013-1020), with multiple processes. See Portal:Data Services/Admin/Wiki Replicas for more details.
To depool a Wiki Replica host, see Portal:Data Services/Admin/Runbooks/Depool wikireplicas.
Data Platform
The Data Platform includes a variety of MariaDB databases:
- Data Platform MediaWiki replicas (dbstore100[7-9]): replicas of the core and x1 clusters
- an-redacteddb1001: multi-instance dedicated sanitized wiki replicas. Used the first days of the month.
- Analytics Meta (an-mariadb100[1-2]): backend for Hive Metastore, Superset, DataHub, Druid.
- matomo1003: local instance serving Matomo
- DB replica (db1208): dedicated backup host
Architecture
Replicas
The master database is the primary server for a given shard. If the master database server fails, then a replica can be promoted to be a new master. See Master switch for more information.
A database replica (or slave database) is another MariaDB or MySQL instance that replicates data from the master database. Most often, we add replicas in production for the purpose of load-balancing read queries, and for backup/failover purposes.
Storage engines
We use InnoDB for storage engine.
In 2015, TokuDB was trialled but was found to be buggy.
Puppet
The main module for DBAs on the operations/puppet tree is "mariadb", which is in its own repo operations/puppet/mariadb. Remember to update the subrepo when committing changes to the mariadb module, otherwise it will not be caught by palladium, strontium, CI, etc.
Despite all the previous, there are mariadb-related files on the main repo- shared among the classes. Those are the puppet/templates/mariadb/ files, where the main configuration and grants lie.
There is a forth place where you will find mariadb-related files, and that is the private repository, but I suppose that requires no explanation (passwords, etc.).
Other DBA related repos are:
- operations/software/dbtools: for scripts used for maintenance
- operations/software/redactatron: labs filtering
- operations/software/wmfmariadbpy
- operations/software/schema-changes
Backups
In 2017, multiple hardware and scalability issues lead to a focus and complete redesign of the database backup architecture, leading to the current one explained at MariaDB/Backups, with focus on full coverage, validation and testing and full automation recovery.
Testing servers
As of today (Dec 2022) there are two testing hosts on a shard called test-s4:
- DB master (writable): db1124.eqiad.wmnet 256GB RAM + RAID10
- DB slave: (read-only): db1125.eqiad.wmnet 256GB RAM + RAID10
Whilst these hosts are normally up, it is not guaranteed they will always be available or up.
These hosts have static data, and are not updated with production data. More tables or wikis can be requested if needed by filing a ticket to DBAs). It is not guaranteed that they'll be included, but they can be studied and some expectations about ETA and if it is possible to have that data will be given on the ticket.
Access to these hosts is granted individually to those who already have an NDA and cluster access if really needed. Please file a ticket and tag DBA to let us know why you need access so we can start a discussion about it.
People with access:
- Data Persistence Members
HAProxy
Main page containing : HAProxy
dbproxy1XXX boxes run HAProxy. Besides making for easier Ops server rotations simply by having a proxy IP in the mix, there are two modes for other stuff: load balancing for slaves and failover for masters. So far, only Miscellaneous cluster masters and the Cloud Services replicas use it via dbproxy1XXX.
We also have codfw proxies (dbproxy2XXX) serving misc services.
Failover
See role::mariadb::proxy::master
Load Balancing
See role::mariadb::proxy::slaves
Monitoring
See MariaDB/monitoring.
Long running queries
You can identify long running queries on logstash. The query killer should stop read queries running longer than 60 seconds, but may not function properly under high load. db-kill can be used in emergencies to kill any query running for longer than 10 seconds.
Replication lag
Production replication lag can be checked on https://orchestrator.wikimedia.org/web/clusters (an NDA is needed to access it).
See MariaDB/troubleshooting#Replication lag and MySQL#Replication lag on how to handle replication lag.
Tables drift between code and production
There are known differences between tables definitions in MW and the live version in production. We have historically worked hard to the most important ones, but there are still lots minor ones that need to be solved.
There is a dashboard where those can be checked/observed: https://drift-tracker.toolforge.org/report/core/
Admin guides
Loading data / provisioning
Setting up a new replica (or repairing a current one) is done through the recovery/provisioning system: MariaDB/Backups
However, one can do still manual hot or cold copies of running or stopped servers through transfer.py script on the cluster management hosts (cumin1002.eqiad.wmnet, cumin2002.codfw.wmnet
).
Rebooting or reimaging a host
The procedure for safely rebooting or reimaging a database host is described at MariaDB/Rebooting_a_host.
Schema changes
See Auto schema
First decide if the schema change can be done online. This only works if:
- The table has a PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE KEY on NOT NULL field(s)
- MediaWiki can ignore the change behind a feature flag
- Table metadata locking has been considered
Offline Schema Changes
Done via Auto schema
Sanitarium and clouddb instances
See more: Sanitarium and clouddb instances
Table Metadata Locking
Both ALTER TABLE need to hold the table metadata lock. They must wait for open transactions to close the table and also block new transactions opening the table. On a busy server and a hot table like page or revision this can easily result in many seconds of delay which is more than enough time for connections to pile up and hit max_connections.
Consider reducing load or depooling the box.
Manipulating the replication tree
Orchestrator displays the full replication tree (requires NDA)
Thanks to GTID replication, implemented almost everywhere in production, you can move slaves just by executing:
(Be aware that due to some old gtid_domain_id living in production, the below command needs to be executed carefully, so don't do it unless you know what you are doing)
STOP SLAVE; CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='<new master fqdn>'; START SLAVE;
Installation
See mariadb roles in puppet.
Hardware installation checklist
Once the physical racking and OS installation has been, normally by DCOPs, the following items must be checked before considering the host ready to receive data.
- Amount of memory showing up on the OS matches the expected
- RAID setup
- RAID level (typically 10)
- RAID stripe size (256K)
- BBU in place and policy set to WriteBack
- Amount of disk space available for srv matches the expected
- Number of CPUs matches the expected value
Setting up a fresh server
- To initialize the database:
/opt/wmf-mariadb106/scripts/mysql_install_db --basedir=/opt/wmf-mariadb106/
- If this is a multi-instance db server, you'll need to provide
--datadir=/srv/sqldata.<SECTION>
as well.
- If this is a multi-instance db server, you'll need to provide
- Start the service:
systemctl start mariadb
- For multi-instance, the service is
mariadb@<SECTION>
- For multi-instance, the service is
- Set up defaults:
/opt/wmf-mariadb106/bin/mysql_secure_installation --basedir=/opt/wmf-mariadb106/ -S /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
- For multi-instance, change it to
-S /run/mysqld/mysqld.<SECTION>.sock
- Don't set root password, accept defaults for everything else.
- For multi-instance, change it to
Packages
Asher started us using stock upstream packages from mariadb.org with the debs "de-debianized" each time to have fewer hooks, allowing puppet to handle stuff. Simply:
apt install wmf-mariadb10X
Where X is the major version, ie:
MariaDB 10.4: wmf-mariadb104
MariaDB 10.6: wmf-mariadb106
Puppet controls manually the systemctl script and the package uses update-alternatives to update the symlinks in /usr/local/bin
. Unlike the upstream versions our packages are fine to install alongside one another.
Importing table spaces from other hosts
Since MySQL 5.6 it is posible to use advantage of transportable table spaces to move around .ibd
files from one server to another (if file per table is enabled.
This feature provides a fast way of copying data from one host to another over the network using compression and nc
for instance.
To learn more about to copy .ibd
files from one host to another, please check out MariaDB/ImportTableSpace.
Account handling
root@localhost account no longer uses passwords for authentication (task T150446), but the UNIX socket authentication plugin. This allows us to stop using passwords (that can be copied, exposed and compromised), and allows the root system user to login from localhost by running:
sudo mysql
or
sudo mysql --skip-ssl
Because mariadb uses the uid of the linux user, there is no need to write passwords to the filesystem anymore, and in the event of a host compromise, only localhost is affected, and not any other host sharing the same password. This could later be extended to other system accounts that only connect from localhost, such as icinga or prometheus. Note that if a superuser is compromised on a host, not having a password is not a further barrier, as root has the ability to manage, read and modify at will MySQL files.
How unix_socket authentication works
Since MariaDB 10.4.3, the plugin is enabled by default
To use it, we have to alter the user we want to authenticate:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO root@localhost IDENTIFIED VIA unix_socket;
This will delete the user password, but will indicate it does not uses the mysql native password authentication, but unix socket.
MariaDB [(none)]> SELECT user,host,password,plugin FROM mysql.user WHERE user='root'; +------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+ | user | host | password | plugin | +------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+ | root | localhost | | unix_socket |
By the way, note that the authentication name is unix_socket, but the plugin loaded is auth_socket.so. Do not use auth_socket on the GRANT/CREATE USER statements.
Also, if for some reason, you revert this change, make sure you put a password back:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO root@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<super_secure_password>';
Dumping tables
We use mydumper for several reasons:
- Its speed and parallelism makes it perfect to save time and load data a lot faster.
- It is easier to recover single tables or rows.
- It compresses nicely.
From the tests we have seen:
- Taking a full dump of s3 takes 1:15h - 88GB
- Taking a full dump of s1 takes 53 minutes - 93GB
- Taking a full dump of s5 takes 1:20h - 93G
Dump data
Right now and in order to start it - as it doesn't accept any flag as no to read the default file, the following section needs to be commented out on the host my.cnf
# ssl-ca=/etc/ssl/certs/Puppet_Internal_CA.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/ssl/cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/ssl/server.key # ssl-verify-server-cert
Once that is done, a typical way to dump a database:
mydumper -c -h localhost -t 8 -u root -r 100000000 -B wikidatawiki -S /tmp/mysql.sock -o output_directory_name
-c To compress the data files
-h The host
-t How many parallel threads you want dumping at the same time
-u The user
-r Try to split tables into chunks of this many rows
-B Database you want to dump
-S Specify the socket to connect to
"-o" Specify the output directory where you want to save the files to. If not specified, it will generate a directory under your current path called: export-2017xxxxx-xxxxx with all the files.
Load data
Please check the dump data section to make sure you are able to connect (comment out the SSL options).
By default it disables the logging into the binlog
Once that is done, typically you want to run:
myloader -h localhost -t 8 -u root -S /tmp/mysql.sock -d export-xxxxx
-h The host
-t How many parallel threads you want loading the data at the same time
-u The user
-S Specify the socket to connect to
-d The directory you want to import the files from
Production section failover checklist
- It has been suggested that this page should be merged with MariaDB/troubleshooting#Depooling_a_master_(a.k.a._promoting_a_new_slave_to_master)
Switch master
Use https://switchmaster.toolforge.org/schedule to get the ticket and the gerrit patches, if that doesn't work, there is a script: db-switchover
that automates most of these steps.
Restarting switch master tool
If a change is made to the templates or anything regarding the tool, please update its code:
ssh login.toolforge.org become switchmaster cd www/python/src/ git pull webservice --backend=kubernetes python3.9 restart
Misc section failover checklist (example with m2)
OLD MASTER: db1065
NEW MASTER: db1132
- Check configuration differences between new and old master
$ pt-config-diff h=db1068.eqiad.wmnet,F=/root/.my.cnf h=db1081.eqiad.wmnet,F=/root/.my.cnf
- Silence alerts on all hosts
- Topology changes: move everything under db1132
db-switchover --timeout=1--only-slave-move db1065.eqiad.wmnet db1132.eqiad.wmnet
- Disable puppet @db1065, puppet @db1132
puppet agent --disable "switchover to db1132"
- Merge gerrit: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/puppet/+/519975/
- Run puppet on dbproxy1002 and dbproxy1007 and check the config
run-puppet-agent && cat /etc/haproxy/conf.d/db-master.cfg
- Start the failover
!log Failover m2 from db1065 to db1132 - T226952 root@cumin1001:~/wmfmariadbpy/wmfmariadbpy# db-switchover --skip-slave-move db1065 db1132
- Reload haproxies
dbproxy1002: systemctl reload haproxy && echo "show stat" | socat /run/haproxy/haproxy.sock stdio dbproxy1007: systemctl reload haproxy && echo "show stat" | socat /run/haproxy/haproxy.sock stdio
- kill connections on the old master (db1065)
pt-kill --print --kill --victims all --match-all F=/dev/null,S=/run/mysqld/mysql.sock
- Restart puppet on old and new masters (for heartbeat):db1065 and db1132
run-puppet-agent -f
- Check services affected (otrs,debmonitor) DEBMONITOR and OTRS looking good
- Clean up lag in orchestrator. Typically you need to go to the new master's heartbeat database and clean up the old master server_id from that table (with replication enabled):
select * from heartbeat; -- Get the server_id from the old master delete from heartbeat where server_id=171970778; -- example id for db1183
- change events for query killer:
events_coredb_master.sql on the new master db1132 events_coredb_slave.sql on the new slave db1065
- Update/resolve phabricator ticket about failover https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T226952
- Create decommissioning ticket for db1065
Special section: x1 master switchover
x1 is a "special" section which cannot be put on read-only on mediawiki, so it needs to rely on the db-switchover script which puts MySQL on read-only. When failing over, please tag the following Teams and people on the phabricator task so they can have a heads up as they are x1 stakeholders and need to know that x1 will have writes blocked for around one minute.
- Subscribers: Tgr, JoeWalsh, Dbrant, Ladsgroup, Addshore, Legoktm
- Tags: Cognate, Growth-Team, Language-Team, User-notice, UrlShortener, StructuredDiscussions, MediaWiki-extensions-BounceHandler, ContentTranslation, Reading List Service, WikimediaEditorTasks.
Example task: phab:T226358
Decommissioning a mariadb host server checklist
See MariaDB/Decommissioning_a_DB_Host
Depooling a broken or lagged replica
From one of the cluster management hosts (cumin1002.eqiad.wmnet, cumin2002.codfw.wmnet
):
dbctl instance dbXXXX depool dbctl config commit -m "dbXXXX depooled"
Create a task with the DBA tag so DBAs can follow up and checkout what happened, a proper fix etc
If the broken host is a parsercache, follow this procedure.
Enabling a new external storage (es) section
The process of enabling a new external storage section can be complex and require different steps.
Pre steps
- Check all the involved servers have replication working and enabled (with SSL). Check replication lag is 0
- Check all the involved servers have weight (if not done, check the section below)
- Check pt-heartbeat is running
- Check all the involved servers have notifications enabled (and Icinga looks clean)
- Check the future active master has read_only set to OFF
- Check the future servers have all the wikis and blobs_clusterXX tables created. This is an example ticket T245720
- Check wikiadmin wikiuser have grants.
Setting up the servers with dbctl
external storage sections normally have the following weights: master: 0 slave1: 100 slave2: 100
In order to be able to do so, use dbctl to generate those configs.
dbctl instance esXXXX edit
And leave it like this for the master
# Editing object eqiad/esXXXX host_ip: 10.XX.XX.XX note: port: 3306 sections: esX: {percentage: 100, pooled: true, weight: 0}
And like this for a slave
# Editing object eqiad/esXXXX host_ip: 10.XX.XX.XX note: port: 3306 sections: esX: {percentage: 100, pooled: true, weight: 100}
Commit the change
dbtcl config commit -m "Set weights for the new es hosts - TXXXXXX"
Mediawiki patches and deployment
In order to be able to set the new external storage there are two steps needed from mediawiki point of view. They can be just one, but in order to catch errors, it better be split into two.
- Enable the new section in MW, this should be a NOOP, but would allow testing before going fully live.
- Add the section as described here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/577185/
- Make sure to double check the blobs_clusterXX entry match the tables number on the future new tables.
Once the change is merged and deployed to the passive DC, use Wikimedia Debug extension to browse the site via mwdebug2001.codfw.wmnet and monitor errors. If everything looks fine, deploy on the active DC.
Use shell.php from a mwmaint host to fetch stuff from those new tables, to make sure grants and everything is fine. Getting a false is a good thing. Everything else might require further research.
root@mwmaint1002:~# mwscript shell.php --wiki=enwiki Psy Shell (PHP 7.2.26 — cli) by Justin Hileman >>> ExternalStore::fetchFromURL( 'DB://cluster26/1' ) Wikimedia/Rdbms/DBConnectionError with message 'Cannot access the database: No working replica DB server: Unknown error' >>> ExternalStore::fetchFromURL( 'DB://cluster25/1' ) => b"Ý][û~¸»¿vÇ(i╚
If everything looks fine, the next patch should be enabling that section to be writable.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/577189/
Before fully deploying that change, test it on mwdebug. Generate some writes by writing on your talk page and checking on the new blobs_clusterXX table. It might take a few writes to be able to show up there, as it is balanced with the other existing external storage masters.
Try a few times, and a few projects to make sure the row shows up there and on all the hosts (to double check replication is working as expected).
If the writes are showing up, and nothing else is errorring, you are good to go and fully deploy to all DCs.
Once deployed, monitor for lag, errors and periodically select from the new tables to make sure it is getting new things.
- Update spicerack to get these new sections up to date: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/software/spicerack/+/576297/
Setting a external storage section to read only
Whenever an existing external storage section needs to go read-only, these are the steps that need to be taken.
- Create a MW patch that set it to read-only and remove it from the DefaultExternalStore : https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/578766/
As always, first push to the passive DC, monitor for logs and if all is ok, push to the active DC:
- Once the change is live, monitor the master binlog (skip heartbeat entries) and make sure the INSERTS stopped a few seconds after the change is live everywhere.
- Disable alerts for 10-15 minutes on the involved servers, to avoid any alerts.
- Once writes has stopped, prepare and push a puppet patch to change those hosts to standalone: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/puppet/+/578816/
- Set read_only=1 on the master
- Once puppet has run on the master, check that pt-heartbeat has stopped there. Once done, run show master status; to make sure nothing is being written.
- Run the following across all the hosts: show master status; show slave status\G and note those positions somewhere.
- Reset replication across all the hosts: stop slave; reset slave all
- Update tendril to hide that replication tree:
update shards set display=0 where name='esX'
- Update zarcillo to reflect those hosts as standalone
update sections set standalone=1 where name='esX';
- Slowly give some weight to the old masters, and now standalone - probably best done in a few commits, to slowly warm their buffer pool
dbctl instance esXXXX edit dbctl config commit -m "Slowly give weight to old and now standalone es masters TXXXXXX"
dbctl at the moment doesn't treat standalone hosts any different from a normal replicating section. So it will be showed normally on either db-eqiad.json and db-codfw.json even though there is no real master anymore but just standalone hosts.
- Update Spicerack to reflect that these new sections are RO https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/operations/software/spicerack/+/576297/
IPv6 and MariaDB
MariaDB (and MySQL) should have good support of IPv6. However, due to account handling being based on IP addresses, not DNS, a lot of issues, specially with authentication and grants can arise:
- Hosts using DNS will try to contact mysqld using IPv6 first. That will cause timeouts (of several seconds) until it fails back to IPv4
- Privileges may fail completely (access denied):
- When setting up and performing mysql backups
- When accessing host from remote mysql root clients (e.g. cumin)
- When using replication
- When using watchdog user for tendril
db1108, as of July 2020, is the only host configured using IPv6 while holding a mysql service.
Warming up production databases
This is mostly done before a DC switchover so the databases are not totally cold (aka with nothing cached).
We do this in three different ways:
MW warmup script
From a mw maintenance host make sure you have a urls-cluster.txt file:
root@mwmaint1002:/home/marostegui# cat urls-cluster.txt # Purpose: Root redirect https://%server/ # Purpose: Main Page, Skin cache, Sidebar cache, Localisation cache https://%server/wiki/Main_Page # Purpose: MobileFrontend, Main Page https://%mobileServer/wiki/Main_Page # Purpose: Login page https://%server/wiki/Special:UserLogin # Purpose: API, Recent changes https://%server/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&list=recentchanges
If you want to warm up eqiad, simply run:
nodejs /var/lib/mediawiki-cache-warmup/warmup.js urls-cluster.txt spread appservers.svc.eqiad.wmnet
Normally you might want to run this several times for hours to make sure you touch as many wikis and hosts as possible. In the output of the script you'll be able to see how the loading times start to decrease over time.
This script is pretty harmless and be run without much babysitting in a loop:
while true; do nodejs /var/lib/mediawiki-cache-warmup/warmup.js urls-cluster.txt spread appservers.svc.eqiad.wmnet ; sleep 15; done
Comparing tables
Using db-compare over several is a good way to bring some of the most accessed tables into memory. This is a very gentle script and can be run on the background for hours/days without many issues.
The idea here is to check data consistency between DCs and bring data into the buffer pool. We have a file with the most important tables to be checked/warmed up, which is called tables_to_check.txt and lives at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wikimedia/operations-software/master/dbtools/tables_to_check.txt
The content:
actor actor_id archive ar_id change_tag ct_id comment comment_id content content_id logging log_id pagelinks pl_from page page_id revision rev_id revision_actor_temp revactor_rev revision_comment_temp revcomment_rev slots slot_revision_id text old_id user user_id watchlist wl_id
What we normally do is to iterate over all the databases on a given section and go through all the tables across all the wikis there. The idea is to select all the production hosts on the passive DC and compare them against the vslow,dump host on the active DC.
The list of hosts per section can be retrieved from zarcillo database, orchestrator or with the section tool: The list of databases per section can be retrieved from the sX.dblist files present on wmf-config repo
Once those things are ready, we can simply iterate over all the tables with a loop (example of enwiki (s1):
cat git/mediawiki-config/dblists/s1.dblist | grep -v "#" | while read db; do cat tables_to_check.txt | while read table index; do echo "$db.$table"; db-compare $db $table $index db2146.codfw.wmnet:3306 db1163 db1099:3311 db1105:3311 db1106 db1118 db1119 db1134 db1135 db1164 db1169 db1184 || break 2; done ; done
If differences are found, they need to be investigated BEFORE giving greenlight for the DC switchover.
Warming up ES hosts with compare
External store hosts are different as they only have one table per wiki, and depending on the section it is name differently, they are all called blobs_clusterX.
In Sept 2021 this is the mapping: Read only sections: es1 blob_cluster1 until blob_cluster23 es2 blob_cluster24 es3 blob_cluster5
Writable sections: es4 blob_cluster26 es5 blob_cluster27
This comparison isn't trustable for data drifts as the PK is a blob_id but can still be used to warm up things. In this case, the iteration follow the same pattern as a normal one, you simply need to check the same table across all the databases existing on the hosts, that can be done with the following loop (as data drift isn't to be trusted, no need to compare against the active DC, so just comparing them within the passive DC):
for i in `mysql.py -hes1023 -e "show databases" -BN`; do db-compare $i blobs_cluster27 blob_id es1023 es1024 es1025; done
Warming up parsercache hosts
For parsercache hosts, the easiest way is to simply do a table count on all its tables.
for i in `mysql.py -hpc1011 parsercache -BN -e "show tables"`; do echo $i; mysql.py -hpc1012 parsercache -e "select count(*) from $i"; mysql.py -hpc1011 parsercache -e "select count(*) from $i";mysql.py -hpc1013 parsercache -e "select count(*) from $i"; done
Warming up x1 hosts
Hosts in x1 have all the wikis but only a few tables per wiki and we mostly only warm up the echo tables. The databases present on x1 are at echo.dblists on the mediawiki-config repo: https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki-config/blob/master/dblists/echo.dblist
The tables to check file is present at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wikimedia/operations-software/master/dbtools/echo_tables_to_check.txt
This is the content on Sept 2021:
echo_event event_id echo_notification notification_event echo_target_page etp_page
The check can be performed with a simple loop:
cat git/mediawiki-config/dblists/echo.dblist | grep -v "#" | while read db; do cat echo_tables_to_check.txt | while read table index; do echo "$db.$table"; db-compare $db $table $index db2096.codfw.wmnet db1103 db1120 db1137; done; done
Replaying traffic
Probably the most effective way to warm up tables, but the most time consuming one and definitely dangerous. So proceed with caution.
Another way to warm up more concrete tables and hosts is to replay some of the most common/slow queries that are arriving to the active DC and send them to the passive DC. This requires a bit more manual work but this is a high level way of doing it.
Which queries to replay
Live traffic
If you are not 100% sure of what you are doing, do not proceed with this warm up method. YOU COULD CORRUPT DATA
On the passive DC, you can enable slow query log for a few seconds using the following commands. It highly depends on the day the kind of queries you can grab, but in general you cannot really reuse them as some of them have specific timestamps (especially recentchanges).
First, make sure you are using FILE as a way to log queries and which file is it:
> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "general_log%"; +------------------+------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +------------------+------------+ | general_log | OFF | | general_log_file | db1169.log | +------------------+------------+
Now you are ready to enable, capture half a minute or a minute of traffic and then disable it:
SET global general_log = 1; select sleep (30); SET global general_log = 0;
Keep in mind that if forgotten, this file can grow to huge values, so always try to use the enable and disable on the same command so you don't forget to disable it. Unfortunately this captures all queries and not only SELECTs (as log_disabled_statements isn't dynamic)
Once you've got the file, you need to exclude INSERT DELETE UPDATE and ONLY leave SELECTs statements otherwise YOU COULD CORRUPT DATA
If you are not 100% sure of what you are doing, do not proceed with this warm up method.
Once the file only has SELECTs, you can replay them to all the hosts you want to warm up
This page is a part of the SRE Data Persistence technical documentation
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