Host Bulgaria Monitors and Optimizes Databases with MariaDB

Host Bulgaria is a popular web hosting company in Sliven, and have been in the web hosting business for over five years. They currently host in excess of 7,000 web sites.

Host Bulgaria run a mix of CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 servers. While CentOS 4 precludes the use of MariaDB (MariaDB 5.2 is currently only certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5/CentOS 5 and above), all of Host Bulgaria's production CentOS 5 servers run MariaDB 5.2.

The servers generally consist of 2x quad core Xeon processors, 32GB RAM and a combination of 12 SAS and SATA disks. 2-4 15,000rpm SAS disks are dedicated to the database. Servers running MariaDB all have 64-bit CentOS 5 and cPanel installed. MariaDB is configured for maximum memory efficiency with a 1GB query cache. The table cache, read/join/sort buffers, and innodb_buffer_pool_size are also increased. The servers also run Apache, PHP, and Exim for mail.

Panayot Belchev, proprietor of Host Bulgaria, says that they migrated to MariaDB largely because of the User Statistics feature. "Of course, the MySQL-Sun-Oracle news also helped us to make the switch," he added.

Using userstat, they monitor each customer's CPU usage as well as detect excessive number of update/select queries. They also help customers optimise tables that lack proper indexes.

"Migrating from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.2 was as simple as removing MySQL RPMs and installing the MariaDB packages, then running mysql_upgrade," Panayot stated. Host Bulgaria started their immersion in MariaDB 5.2-beta on a new server, and they gradually started adding customer accounts. "We were impressed with the stability of the beta and without a doubt eased our decision to power all customer databases using MariaDB," he added.