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I have a development MySQL server running on a dedicated CentOS virtual machine, under VirtualBox & Windows.

I've been using it for months with a pretty decent performance, and have an history of SQL patches to create a project's database from scratch that up to now, was taking less than a minute to run.

When I tried to re-run the patches today, it started to take several minutes, which is considerably slower than it used to be.

Here is a top output when it looks the most "busy":

top output

But most of the time, the output is the following:

top output

mysqladmin status says:

Uptime: 805  Threads: 3  Questions: 894  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 1277
Flush tables: 1  Open tables: 98  Queries per second avg: 1.110

So, for me, the server looks almost idle, although it's actually running a big SQL patch, and making me wait for ages...

Any idea what could be slowing it down?

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Is it possible that your shared disk is having IO/disk issues or is Busy? Seeing that you are running a virtual host on your Windows PC. –  Danie Jan 15 '13 at 10:02
I just found the reason (see below). Thanks for your comment! –  Benjamin Jan 15 '13 at 10:06

1 Answer 1

Ok, I found the reason. The queries themselves weren't slow, but the connection to the MySQL server was. And because the mysql command-line was executed once for each patch, that made it painfully slow.

I added the following line to my.cnf:


And everything's back to normal!

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You may want to add skip-host-cache as well : See my DBA StackExchange post dba.stackexchange.com/a/7122/877 –  RolandoMySQLDBA Jan 15 '13 at 14:12
@Rolando What does skip-host-cache do when the name resolution is disabled? –  Benjamin Jan 15 '13 at 15:31
--skip-host-cache disables internal host cache for faster name-to-IP resolution. In this case, the server performs a DNS lookup every time a client connects. –  RolandoMySQLDBA Jan 15 '13 at 15:39
I thought that skip-name-resolve would prevent ip-to-name resolution, and that because a cache would make sense only when name resolution is On, skip-host-cache would be useless (ineffective) in this case? –  Benjamin Jan 15 '13 at 16:45
I usually recommend both be used anyway. –  RolandoMySQLDBA Jan 15 '13 at 16:47

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