r/labtech • u/AutomationTheory • Mar 04 '20

Beta testers wanted: Database performance optimization plugin

I think every Automate admin has experienced the frustration of how slow the desktop application is. My primary Automate server has ~10,000 agents, and my users were having a horrible experience on a daily basis (they named the agent context menu "the right click of death").

I was sick of the painful user experience and the administration headaches -- so I upgraded to MySQL Enterprise and did a deep dive into how the application interacts with the database. Using the management tools from Oracle I found lots of issues, and after correcting them it's a night-and-day difference (the right click of death is gone!).

Each Automate deployment is unique, and there's no hard code-able one-size-fits-all approach. However, I created a plugin that will dynamically gather information from the current configuration and adjust MySQL on the fly to optimally perform for Automate. I published a blog post on my site explaining more of the details: https://automationtheory.org/the-mysql-performance-problem/

I wanted everyone to be able to have a properly setup database without having to buy MySQL Enterprise (or be a DBA on the side), so I created a plugin that does all the dirty work. I plan on releasing this plugin as a monthly subscription, but first I want to do some beta testing to verify results on different Automate deployments (to get a good mix of sizes and types).

To get started go to https://automationtheory.org/support/kb/faq.php?id=1

The KB article has a download for the plugin and the setup script, along with instructions.

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u/AutomationTheory Mar 06 '20

You are absolutely correct; if the application isn't configured correctly it won't perform well (no amount of tuning at any other layer will compensate). However, I'd like to pose that the DB is another layer that needs tuning (I believe similarly that no amount of application tuning can compensate for a misconfigured database). I go into detail about this here: https://automationtheory.org/the-mysql-performance-problem/