Hi all!
Recently I caught a bunch of connections in ‘TIME_WAIT’ on a MySQL Server through ‘netstat – antp 3306’…
After some time, we identified this was caused by the environment not using DNS, only fixed IPS (uuugh!)…
As you know, for security measures MySQL maintains a host cache for connections established. From MySQL docs:
“For each new client connection, the server uses the client IP address to check whether the client host name is in the host cache. If not, the server attempts to resolve the host name. First, it resolves the IP address to a host name and resolves that host name back to an IP address. Then it compares the result to the original IP address to ensure that they are the same. The server stores information about the result of this operation in the host cache. If the cache is full, the least recently used entry is discarded.”
9.12.6.2 DNS Lookup Optimization and the Host Cache
For this reason, there is a DNS ‘reverse’ lookup for each login was hanging this connections.
The solution?
Right way: Add an A type registry in DNS for the hosts. Use DNS!
Quick way: Add on /etc/hosts from database server the mapping for the connected hosts, avoiding the DNS Lookup.
Quicker way: Setting the skip-name-resolve variable at /etc/my.cnf. This variable avoids this behavior in database layer for new connections and solve the problem.
This is a good (portuguese) post about it: http://wagnerbianchi.com/blog/?p=831
See ya!
Matheus.
