MySQL InnoDB and Plesk9

Having taken delivery of a new server in the last few days I am finding my way around SWsoft Plesk control panel, having last used Plesk in 2003.

The pricing for Plesk 30 domains is reasonable enough**, for it to not add too much to the cost of a server.

This new server is not memory constrained at all, but I find myself in the habit of minimising memory usage anyway.

One of the things which occurred to me was to switch off InnoDB in MySQL so as to:

1. Save some memory – the fewer storage engines the smaller each mysql process should be in memory.
2. Avoid having to worry about managing/rotating ib_logfile0 and any other InnoDB logging

Simple enough to disable InnoDB – just need to put…

 skip-innodb

in the section…

[mysqld]

…in a suitable configuration file (perhaps my.cnf on your server)

All this seemed fairly straightforward to me and so I went ahead and made the change.

The first sign of trouble was the appearance of some diagnostics headings in the main area of the Plesk panel 😦

Having a look at the server from ssh shell and trying

stopall

…then…

startall

…gave me some idea of what might be the problem:

console output

Rather than spend a lot of time investigating whether Plesk really does use InnoDB, I just re-enabled InnoDB for MySQL and restarted the container.

The problem went away 🙂

**Plesk 30 domains when included by your server provider is reasonably priced.
If you wish to purchase a domain license yourself then the cost is a bit steeper, and you might consider taking a look at HyperVM/Kloxo (or other open source offerings)