Question

I just reinstalled Windows 7 and I am trying to get my development environment up and running again. XAMPP installed ok, and my application is in htdocs and all databases have imported fine. I can view them in phpMyAdmin and everything looks intact.

When trying to run the application, queries are so slow that most pages timeout before all the queries can complete.

For example, pages this computer could generate in 3 seconds before, now go up to 30 seconds and the page times out.

This is an XAMPP installation 1.7.7, but I have tried rolling back to their older versions and got the same result.

There is nothing in the log files, as it’s not actually erroring out, it’s just performing the queries very slowly.

Even navigating the databases via phpMyAdmin takes about 3-10 seconds to load pages whereas it has previously been instant. So this eliminates my application (which also hasn’t changed since when it was working very quickly before).

Any ideas what could be causing this big slowdown in a fresh xampp install? Was there something in httpd.conf, php.ini or my.ini I might have setup prevously that got wiped by the fresh install and might now cause the database access to be slow?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem appeared to be in the query cache and InnoDB setup for MySQL. Although XAMPP has lines for InnoDB in the my.ini, there were additional that needed to be added.

Below is the config I have saved from my previous build. When I added these to my.ini and restarted the server everything seemed to work at full speed again.

I am not sure whether this fixed an underlying slowdown issue, or if the use of a query cache is now just masking it, but it’s working well enough! On with development!

    #----------------------------------------------------
    #          !!!! Query Cache Config !!!!
    #----------------------------------------------------

    query-cache-size = 524288000
    query-cache-limit = 5242880
    query-cache-type = 1

    #----------------------------------------------------
    #          !!!! InnoDB Buffer Config !!!!
    #----------------------------------------------------

    innodb-buffer-pool-size = 1000M
    innodb-additional-mem-pool-size = 200M
    innodb-log-files-in-group = 2
    innodb-log-buffer-size = 10M
    innodb-file-per-table = 1

UPDATE

Sample config file that worked using this technique (MySQL 5.7 tested on Windows)

# The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients
[client] 
# password       = your_password 
port            = 3306 
socket          = "C:/xampp/mysql/mysql.sock"


# Here follows entries for some specific programs 

# The MySQL server
[mysqld]
port= 3306
socket = "C:/xampp/mysql/mysql.sock"
basedir = "C:/xampp/mysql" 
tmpdir = "C:/xampp/tmp" 
datadir = "C:/xampp/mysql/data"
pid_file = "mysql.pid"
# enable-named-pipe
key_buffer = 16M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
sort_buffer_size = 512K
net_buffer_length = 8K
read_buffer_size = 256K
read_rnd_buffer_size = 512K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M
log_error = "mysql_error.log"

# Change here for bind listening
# bind-address="127.0.0.1" 
# bind-address = ::1          # for ipv6

# Where do all the plugins live
plugin_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/lib/plugin/" 

# Don't listen on a TCP/IP port at all. This can be a security enhancement,
# if all processes that need to connect to mysqld run on the same host.
# All interaction with mysqld must be made via Unix sockets or named pipes.
# Note that using this option without enabling named pipes on Windows
# (via the "enable-named-pipe" option) will render mysqld useless!
# 
# commented in by lampp security
#skip-networking
#skip-federated

# Replication Master Server (default)
# binary logging is required for replication
# log-bin deactivated by default since XAMPP 1.4.11
#log-bin=mysql-bin

# required unique id between 1 and 2^32 - 1
# defaults to 1 if master-host is not set
# but will not function as a master if omitted
server-id   = 1

# Replication Slave (comment out master section to use this)
#
# To configure this host as a replication slave, you can choose between
# two methods :
#
# 1) Use the CHANGE MASTER TO command (fully described in our manual) -
#    the syntax is:
#
#    CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST=<host>, MASTER_PORT=<port>,
#    MASTER_USER=<user>, MASTER_PASSWORD=<password> ;
#
#    where you replace <host>, <user>, <password> by quoted strings and
#    <port> by the master's port number (3306 by default).
#
#    Example:
#
#    CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='125.564.12.1', MASTER_PORT=3306,
#    MASTER_USER='joe', MASTER_PASSWORD='secret';
#
# OR
#
# 2) Set the variables below. However, in case you choose this method, then
#    start replication for the first time (even unsuccessfully, for example
#    if you mistyped the password in master-password and the slave fails to
#    connect), the slave will create a master.info file, and any later
#    change in this file to the variables' values below will be ignored and
#    overridden by the content of the master.info file, unless you shutdown
#    the slave server, delete master.info and restart the slaver server.
#    For that reason, you may want to leave the lines below untouched
#    (commented) and instead use CHANGE MASTER TO (see above)
#
# required unique id between 2 and 2^32 - 1
# (and different from the master)
# defaults to 2 if master-host is set
# but will not function as a slave if omitted
#server-id       = 2
#
# The replication master for this slave - required
#master-host     =   <hostname>
#
# The username the slave will use for authentication when connecting
# to the master - required
#master-user     =   <username>
#
# The password the slave will authenticate with when connecting to
# the master - required
#master-password =   <password>
#
# The port the master is listening on.
# optional - defaults to 3306
#master-port     =  <port>
#
# binary logging - not required for slaves, but recommended
#log-bin=mysql-bin


# Point the following paths to different dedicated disks
#tmpdir = "C:/xampp/tmp"
#log-update = /path-to-dedicated-directory/hostname

# Uncomment the following if you are using BDB tables
#bdb_cache_size = 4M
#bdb_max_lock = 10000

# Comment the following if you are using InnoDB tables
#skip-innodb
innodb_data_home_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/data"
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend
innodb_log_group_home_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/data"
#innodb_log_arch_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/data"
## You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 %
## of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1000M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 200M
## Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size = 250M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 10M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50

## UTF 8 Settings
#init-connect=\'SET NAMES utf8\'
#collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci
#character_set_server=utf8
#skip-character-set-client-handshake
#character_sets-dir="C:/xampp/mysql/share/charsets"

[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M

[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
# Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL
#safe-updates

[isamchk]
key_buffer = 20M
sort_buffer_size = 20M
read_buffer = 2M
write_buffer = 2M

[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 20M
sort_buffer_size = 20M
read_buffer = 2M
write_buffer = 2M

[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout