The Ultimate Guide to High Availability with MariaDB
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Limiting Size of Created Disk Temporary Files and Tables Overview

MariaDB starting with 11.5

From MariaDB 11.5, it's possible to limit the size of created disk temporary files and tables. When the internal in-memory temporary table is oversize and converting to MyISAM/Aria table to store on disk, this option will limit the max space of tmp_dir. If a new disk temporary table will cause tmp_dir over the limitation, then this query will return an error.

Temporary Space

The temporary space includes:

  • All SQL level temporary files. This includes files for filesort, transaction temporary space, analyze, binlog_stmt_cache etc. It does not include engine internal temporary files used for repair, alter table, index pre sorting etc.
  • All internal on disk temporary tables created as part of resolving a SELECT, multi-source update etc.

Special Cases

  • When doing a commit, the last flush of the binlog_stmt_cache will not cause an error even if the temporary space limit is exceeded. This is to avoid giving errors on commit. This means that a user can temporary go over the limit with up to binlog_stmt_cache_size.

System Variables

There are two system variables used for controlling this feature:

Status Variables

Information Schema

Noteworthy issue

  • One has to be careful when using small values for max_tmp_space limit together with binary logging and with non transactional tables.
  • If a binary log entry for the query is larger than binlog_stmt_cache_size and one hits the limit of max_tmp_space when flushing the entry to disk, the query will abort and the binary log will not contain the last changes to the table. This will also stop the replica!
  • This is also true for all Aria tables as Aria cannot do rollback (except in case of crashes)!
  • One way to avoid it is to use @@binlog_format=statement for queries that update many lot of rows.

Implementation

  • All writes to temporary files or internal temporary tables, that increase the file size, are routed through temp_file_size_cb_func() which updates and checks the temp space usage.
  • Most of the temporary file monitoring is done inside IO_CACHE. Temporary file monitoring is done inside the Aria engine.
  • MY_TRACK and MY_TRACK_WITH_LIMIT are new flags for ini_io_cache(). MY_TRACK means that we track the file usage. TRACK_WITH_LIMIT means that we track the file usage and we give an error if the limit is breached. This is used to not give an error on commit when binlog_stmt_cache is flushed.
  • global_tmp_space_used contains the total tmp space used so far. This is needed quickly check against max_total_tmp_space_usage.
  • Temporary space errors are using EE_LOCAL_TMP_SPACE_FULL and handler errors are using HA_ERR_LOCAL_TMP_SPACE_FULL. This is needed until we move general errors to it's own error space so that they cannot conflict with system error numbers.
  • Return value of my_chsize() and mysql_file_chsize() has changed so that -1 is returned in the case my_chsize() could not decrease the file size (very unlikely and will not happen on modern systems). All calls to _chsize() are updated to check for > 0 as the error condition.
  • At the destruction of THD we check that THD::tmp_file_space == 0
  • At server end we check that global_tmp_space_used == 0
  • As a precaution against errors in the tmp_space_used code, one can set max_tmp_space_usage and max_total_tmp_space_usage to 0 to disable the tmp space quota errors.
  • truncate_io_cache() function added.
  • Aria tables using static or dynamic row length are registered in 8K increments to avoid some calls to update_tmp_file_size().

See Also

  • MDEV-9101 - Limit size of created disk temporary files and tables
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