wagnerbianchi.com

MySQL 5.5.X – Sort aborted

This morning I started investigating a file sort problem that is happening with a report server. Actually, what caught more my attention was what is really behind of the error message that is appearing many time along MySQL report server’s error log. Yes, this particular server is a slave server used just for extract reports on business data and because that, this kind if server generally is prepared to have good response to read queries which use aggregations COUNT(), SUM(), AVG() and consequently group data by some spacial column. BTW, all the data will be more in memory than on disk and all that story.

But, what is behind the message “[Warning] Sort aborted, host:” ? So, researching for the same case on the internet, I found that some of the problems reported by MySQL on log_error is around these possibilites:

Insufficient disk space in tmpdir prevented tmpfile from being created

This one is easier to check, just df -h /tmp will give you the notice about all the avail space you have at this point at the temporary dir. So, a good question here is, what do I research for when get the notice that there is enough space in /tmp dir? This is the time to get the query what is causing the issue and re execute it, monitoring the /tmp dir and checking if it’s getting full.

Somebody ran KILL in the middle of a filesort

At this point, I agree with Suresh Kuna when he said that “as a DBA, we can’t do much with the first point apart from informing customer to check at the application side for connection drop outs”. The query can be stopped by a error reading packages, a transactions timeout or even a replication slave timeout. Many variables get involved when analysing this kind of problem, but, mainly, problems regarding a user that give up the report’s query in the processing midst.

The server was shutdown while some queries were sorting

When the error is reported to the error log, probably you have an opportunity to observe the timestamp associated with that and then, go through the details on MySQL Server shutdown reading along the error log entries.

A transaction got rolled back or aborted due to lock wait timeout or deadlock

At this point we can consider many things but the main ones are the checking of ENGINE INNODB STATUS which will report all the deadlocks in case you’re using InnoDB to handle database tables or even the log_error that will report message errors regrading occurred deadlocks with local server transaction or if the local server act as a slave, the slave, the message can report that the deadlock is happening with a replicated transaction – innodb_lock_wait_timeout and slave_net_timeout can help with this. Another variables that can be used is slave_transaction_retries which reports if a replication slave SQL thread fails to execute a transaction because of an InnoDB deadlock or because the transaction’s execution time exceeded InnoDB’s innodb_lock_wait_timeout.

Unexpected errors, such as source table or even tmp table was corrupt.

In this case, depending on the size of the involved table (sometimes you won’t be able to know what is the target table just reading the log_error), a simple CHECK TABLE can be effective in get to know if the table has corrupted pages or another errors.

Processing of a subquery failed which was also sorting

This is a classic case in majority of times. The good news is that when a subquery fails to be sorted out it’s a good case to review the value configured to sort_buffer_size. TAKE CARE, do not increase it without checking the reason and the * status variables to study what is the best value to fit the server’s requirements in file sorting process.

Considering what is explained on the online MySQL manual, just increase the sort_buffer_size value when the Sort_merge_passes is greater then zero.

Sheri Cabral wrote about that: http://www.pythian.com/blog/sort_buffer_size-and-knowing-why/


You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Leave a Reply