So, I’ve spend the last week or so adding some new features to the site. Mainly for my power usage, but you’ll also notice gas usage info now.

Anywho, to do all this, I’ve been digging into MySQL, which until now I knew enough to do a "select * from table where id=x". I knew really nothing about query optimization, how to find out how long a query took, etc.

So, after some reading, I find out about “explain”. Okay, so I start looking through queries, and digging around for answers.

First, I’ll say the system MySQL is running on it a G4, 1.67ghz. 2gig of ram, and mysql’s main settings are:

skip-locking
key_buffer = 256M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_cache = 256
sort_buffer_size = 1M
read_buffer_size = 1M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 4M
thread_cache_size = 8
query_cache_size = 16M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M
thread_concurrency = 2
skip-thread-priority


Now, I am sure these aren’t ideal… but it’s what I’ve gotten based on one of the template my.cnf files, as well as some googling.

Examples: 200k row table. Each row has 8 columns. One primary key on id, and another index on datetime.

Query 1: "select datetime,kw,temp from power where date(datetime)=20090802;"
Query takes, 0.28 seconds, returns 1440 rows. Explain tells me it’s doing a simple “where”, looking at 200k rows, but that it’s not using a key, or index. Hmm… okay.
Query 2: "select datetime,kw,temp from power where datetime >= 20090802 and datetime < date(20090802 + interval 1 day);"
Query takes, .03 seconds, returns 1440 rows. Explain tells me it's also doing a where, but it's using the datetime index, and only looking at 1363 rows (no idea why that's less than 1440). Huh.

So, question. Why is MySQL not smart enough to realize that the first query should be equal to the second? Who knows... lot of people ask the question online though, why "date(datetime)" doesn't use the "datetime" index. *shrugs*

The other issue I ran into is finding all the dates in the table, in a way that first finds years, then months for those years, then days for those months. Previously, I was doing three queries against the 200k row table, that went something like:

"select distinct year(datetime) from power;"
"select distinct month(datetime) from power where year(datetime)=$year;"
"select day(datetime) from power where month(datetime)=$month and year(datetime)=$year;"

I can hear you cringe from here. It's horrible, but it worked. Each query obviously looked at all 200k rows, and took anywhere from .6-.8 seconds.

So, needless, all three of those took about 2-3 seconds to run, concurrently. ugh. So, what to do? I couldn't think of a good way to speed those times up much with just the one 200k row table, so, I created another table. This table simply holds dates (in date format, as well as year, month, and day), and then daily summaries. So I can easily grab data from this table with either a full date, or just the year, month, or day. I then have indexes for date, year, month, day, and (year,month). Now, when I do the above queries (without the year(), month(), or day() functions) I get results in basically 0.00 seconds (that's what mysql tells me anyway. So, all three running results in basically an instant set of days, months, and years. So, the archive page for power loads all but instantly now, where it used to take a couple seconds.

Back when I first switched to mysql, I figured I was going to have to do this, since it just seemed the logical way to do it. I had a table already set up, I just wasn't populating it (I need to figure out triggers now, so maybe I can have mysql do the population on its own). And ultimately, it's how I handled my flat file setup before. There was a "history" file, and then individual day files. *sigh* Takes figuring something out manually in order to kick someone out of being lazy. I mean, with 200k rows, it was being slow. What happens when I have a year worth of data (about 526k rows). Where, a year worth of data in this summary table is only what, 365 (so, one would expect queries to be about 1500x faster, if things worked linearly) rows?

So, that's it. That's what's kept me busy the past few days. I still have some more stuff I want to add, but I'm pretty happy at this point. Things are faster, and all and all, my server shouldn't come crashing down now when google spiders my site. =)

Have a great weekend. Hopefully I'll post more by Sunday.

UPDATE:
Just made a change to the daily graph system. Since my work yesterday, it was not easy to get to todays power usage info, because the dateselect.php was grabbing info from the summary table, which only contained days in the past. I've just changed how that table is updated. Now, nightly, the previous days row is updated, and the current day is added to the table with just the date, year, month, and day. So, it'll now show up in the dateselect. I think, now that I think about it, I'm going to add a link to the front page for todays info.

More later.