Managing MySQL on Solaris 10: Part 3: Inter-process communication

Ever wondered how threads exchange data between themselves?

This sharing and exchange of data is made possible by inter-process communication, or IPC for short. There are several different types of inter-process communication for instance (IPC,System V IPC and POSIX IPC). In addition Solaris provides an additional advanced Solaris IPC.

According to Wikipedia:

Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data between two or more threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC techniques are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being communicated.

Wikipedia's article on Inter-process communication also goes on to say that "It is widely accepted that IPC can be implemented significantly faster in a microkernel environment than in classical monolithic kernel systems¹." This means that IPC implementation is not as fast in Solaris (and other Unix systems) as it could be.

The socket that MySQL uses is typically present at /tmp/mysql.sock. This socket is an example of usage of traditional UNIX IPC. Sockets allow processes to communicate directly by providing a communication endpoint.

Another example of traditional UNIX IPC usage is when pipes are created which provides for a communication mechanism. On Solaris, when a pipe is created, "two file descriptors, fildes[0] and fildes[1]. The files associated with fildes[0] and fildes[1] are streams and are both opened for reading and writing. The O_NDELAY, O_NONBLOCK, and FD_CLOEXEC flags are cleared on both file descriptors. The fcntl(2) function can be used to set these flags".

"A read from fildes[0] accesses the data written to fildes[1] on a first-in-first-out (FIFO) basis and a read from fildes[1] accesses the data written to fildes[0] also on a FIFO basis³."

The System V IPC consists of System V shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. Kernel tunable parameters for System V IPC are specified in /etc/system file. In Solaris 10, the defaults of most of these parameters were increased to ease the tuning efforts.

Resources and References:

1. Hermann Härtig, Michael Hohmuth, Jochen Liedtke, Sebastian Schönberg, Jean Wolter (October 1997). "The performance of μ-kernel-based systems". Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP), Saint-Malo, France: 74. ISBN 0-89791-916-5.
2. Inter-process communication (Wikipedia)
3. man -a pipe