Periodic MySQL lockup when Wordpress is under heavy load

Question

I have a MySQL 5.1.61 database running behind two load balanced Apache webservers hosting a fairly busy (100K uniques per day) Wordpress sites. I'm caching with Cloudflare, W3TC, and Varnish. Most of the time, the database server handles traffic very well. "show full processlist" shows 20-40 queries at any given time, with most being in the sleep state.

Periodically, though (particularly when traffic spikes or when a large number of comments are cleared), MySQL stops responding. I'll find 1000-1500 queries running, many "sending data", etc. No particular query seems to be straining the database (they're all standard Wordpress queries), but it just seems like the simultaneous volume of requests causes all queries to hang up. I'm (usually) still able to log in, to run "show full processlist", or other queries, but the 1000+ queries already in there just sit. The only solution seems to be to restart mysql (sometimes violently via kill -9 if I can't connect).

All tables are innodb, server has 8 cores, 24GB RAM, plenty of disk space, and the following is my my.cnf:

[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
port=3306
skip-external-locking
skip-name-resolve
user=mysql
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=16M
wait_timeout = 300
query_cache_size=128M
key_buffer_size=400M
thread_cache_size=50
table_cache=8192
skip-name-resolve
max_heap_table_size = 256M
tmp_table_size = 256M
innodb_file_per_table
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 5G
innodb_log_file_size=1G
#innodb_commit_concurrency = 32
#innodb_thread_concurrency = 32
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0
thread_concurrency = 8
join_buffer_size = 256k
innodb_log_file_size = 256M
#innodb_concurrency_tickets = 220
thread_stack     = 256K
max_allowed_packet=512M
max_connections=2500
# Default to using old password format for compatibility with mysql 3.x
# clients (those using the mysqlclient10 compatibility package).
old_passwords=1

#2012-11-03
#attempting a ram disk for tmp tables
tmpdir = /db/tmpfs01

[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

Any suggestions how I can potentially improve MySQL config, or other steps to maintain database stability under heavy load?

Answer 1

Like has been said, think outside the box and do sone rooting around why these queries are slow or somehow hung. An oldie but a good source of problems even for (supposedly;) intelligent system engineers is load balancing causing issues across webserver or database sessions. With all that caching and load balancing going on, are you sure everything is always connecting end-to-end as intended?

Answer 2

I agree with alditis & Bjoern

I'm pretty noobish with mysql but running mysqltuner can reveal some config optimisations based on recent queries of the DB https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl

And if possible store the DB files on a physically separate partition from the OS, the OS can consume IO which slows the DB. Like with Bjoern's logrotate issue.