My wish for the New Year: MySQL DBA's, please install iostat on your servers!

Iostat is a very handy tool to help you investigating what kind of performance problems you have. Especially your databases can cause a lot of troubles to your I/O system and thus it would be very nice if every DBA has installed iostat on all of his MySQL database servers.

Unfortunately most of the Linux distributions do NOT install iostat by default. This causes often unfortunate situations when you are in a MySQL consulting engagement or have a MySQL support case and ask the customer for the output of iostat. In some cases they are not willing or allowed to install iostat on their production systems on the fly (even though I never have seen it causing troubles during or after the installation).

Further iostat is also not too easy to find because is is hidden in the sysstat package. But iostat can be easily post-installed as follows:

shell> sudo apt-get install sysstat
shell> yum install sysstat
shell> rpm -i sysstat-<version>.rpm
shell> dpkg -i sysstat-<version>.deb
shell> emerge -avq sysstat
shell> ./configure ; make ; make install

So my second wish for the New Year is: Linux distributions, please add sysstat to the default installation/base packages!

My preferred way running iostat is:

shell> iostat -kx 1

More about what iostat tells you later on this channel...

For more details go here:

[1] sysstat
[2] iostat man pages