Mongodb CloneCollection vs CopyTo - mongodb

Im in need to store a copy of a collection in a given time, work on that copy (process which could take 20-30 minutes) and then remove the copy.
The copy itself should be an image of the collection in the given time such that any action that occurs after that time, needs to be ignored.
For that MondbDb have 2 methods which do the same but doing it differently and here comes the question.
db.CloneCollection which copies the collection to a new collection (I could find any lock related warnings)
and
db.collection.copyTo
which copies the document but causes collection-wide lock (which could be a problem for me).
Question is, under what assumptions I can work with cloneCollection and CopyTo.
The question related to not only to the lock making.
I would like to ask for suggestions, hints or any idea of out to get the data as fast as possible without hurting workers using the collection. (It also may be that the answer is not including cloneCollection nor copyTo).
Its not an open debate, there is pretty much only 1 desicive answer under the following assumptions:
The collection may contain up to 50m entries.
lock should be reduced to a minimum or none, if possible.
There could be a slight time difference from when I start the process till the full clone of the collection is ready. e.g: if I issue a clone in 10:00 and data from 10:09 is included, it'll be ok as long as its not drastically far.
Im using MongoDB WieredTiger 3.4

Related

About MongoDB repair's working (option, log, progress or so)

MongoDB was accidentally broken, and now in 'repair'. (wiredTiger, old version 3.6)
In my case, repair work is more needed really for some instances, so if there is available option, I consider to use it and firstly to skip less necessary but more indexes, probably erroneous ones.
(But the job is likely to proceed all the data through instances, especially for 'wiredTiger' which is named for a sort of 'interleaved' status, then no way to prioritize, though.)
Second, repair is likely to work longer for those with more indexes, and longer for more data (even with less indexes),
whatever, progress log messages are in standard-out, BTW time expectation seems difficult (just keeping going even no log for four hours). Instances are different in size of less than 100GB or more than 1TB.
Logs being shown on screen would be saved as any file?
If there are some problems, assuming a certain instance has ones (e.g, complexity, poor structure, etc and as a result caused crash), the repair could give some of left crashed and others rescued?
And, practically there is no more possible method to recover instances if repair finally fails?

When's the time to create dedicated collections in MongoDB to avoid difficult queries?

I am asking a question that I assume does not have a simple black and white question but the principal of which I'm asking is clear.
Sample situation:
Lets say I have a collection of 1 million books, and I consistently want to always pull the top 100 rated.
Let's assume that I need to perform an aggregate function every time I perform this query which makes it a little expensive.
It is reasonable, that instead of running the query for every request (100-1000 a second), I would create a dedicated collection that only stores the top 100 books that gets updated every minute or so, thus instead of running a difficult query a 100 times every second, I only run it once a minute, and instead pull from a small collection of books that only holds the 100 books and that requires no query (just get everything).
That is the principal I am questioning.
Should I create a dedicated collection for EVERY query that is often
used?
Should I do it only for complicated ones?
How do I gauge which is complicated enough and which is simple enough
to leave as is?
Is there any guidelines for best practice in those types of
situations?
Is there a point where if a query runs so often and the data doesn't
change very often that I should keep the data in the server's memory
for direct access? Even if it's a lot of data? How much is too much?
Lastly,
Is there a way in MongoDB to cache results?
If so, how can I tell it to fetch the cached result, and when to regenerate the cache?
Thank you all.
Before getting to collection specifics, one does have to differentiate between "real-time data" vis-a-vis data which does not require immediate and real-time presenting of information. The rules for "real-time" systems are obviously much different.
Now to your example starting from the end. The cache of query results. The answer is not only for MongoDB. Data architects often use Redis, or memcached (or other cache systems) to hold all types of information. This though, obviously, is a function of how much memory is available to your system and the DB. You do not want to cripple the DB by giving your cache too much of available memory, and you do not want your cache to be useless by giving it too little.
In the book case, of 100 top ones, since it is certainly not a real time endeavor, it would make sense to cache the query and feed that cache out to requests. You could update the cache based upon a cron job or based upon an update flag (which you create to inform your program that the 100 have been updated) and then the system will run an $aggregate in the background.
Now to the first few points:
Should I create a dedicated collection for EVERY query that is often used?
Yes and no. It depends on the amount of data which has to be searched to $aggregate your response. And again, it also depends upon your memory limitations and btw let me add the whole server setup in terms of speed, cores and memory. MHO - cache is much better, as it avoids reading from the data all the time.
Should I do it only for complicated ones?
How do I gauge which is complicated enough and which is simple enough to leave as is?
I dont think anyone can really black and white answer to that question for your system. Is a complicated query just an $aggregate? Or is it $unwind and then a whole slew of $group etc. options following? this is really up to the dataset and how much information must actually be read and sifted and manipulated. It will effect your IO and, yes, again, the memory.
Is there a point where if a query runs so often and the data doesn't change very often that I should keep the data in the server's memory for direct access? Even if it's a lot of data? How much is too much?
See answers above this is directly connected to your other questions.
Finally:
Is there any guidelines for best practice in those types of situations?
The best you can do here is to time the procedures in your code, monitor memory usage and limits, look at the IO, study actual reads and writes on the collections.
Hope this helps.
Use a cache to store objects. For example in Redis use Redis Lists
Redis Lists are simply lists of strings, sorted by insertion order
Then set expiry to either a timeout or a specific time
Now whenever you have a miss in Redis, run the query in MongoDB and re-populate your cache. Also since cache resids in memory therefore your fetches will be extremely fast as compared to dedicated collections in MongoDB.
In addition to that, you don't have to keep have a dedicated machine, just deploy it within your application machine.

Why mongodb doesn't use the deleted data's space? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Auto compact the deleted space in mongodb?
(4 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I set one shard's maxsize to 20GB and keep remove data every day. but I see one db in this shard's storageSize is about 18G, but its data file on the disk is about 33GB and it keep growing. I know mongo is just sign deleted data, but should it reuse that space? Or I need configure something?
I would not run repair on your database as suggested whenever you feel like getting back your space; this would result in disastrous performance problems for one.
The problem you have is that documents are not "fitting" into the spaces you have in your deleted buckets list (for reference this is a good presentation: http://www.mongodb.com/presentations/storage-engine-internals it will explain everything I am talking about) and since MongoDB runs out of "steam" searching your list before it makes a whole new document you are most likely getting a new extent for every document you are inserting/updating.
You could run a compact but then that is as bad as repair in terms of performance but it will send those delete spaces to a free list which can be used by any size document.
You could also collmod with powerof2sizes: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/command/collMod/#usePowerOf2Sizes which may well fix your problem.
Ideally you need to redo your application, you underestimated how in-place updates/inserts into MongoDB works and now it is slaughtering you.

MongoDB: Switch database/collection referenced by a given name on the fly

My application needs only read access to all of its databases. One of those databases (db_1) hosts a collection coll_1 whose entire contents* need to be replaced periodically**.
My goal is to have no or very little effect on read performance for servers currently connected to the database.
Approaches I could think of with so far:
1. renameCollection
Build a temporary collection coll_tmp, then use renameCollection with dropTarget: true to move its contents over to coll_1. The downside of this approach is that as far as I can tell, renameCollection does not copy indexes, so once the collection is renamed, coll_1 would need reindexing. While I don't have a good estimate of how long this would take, I would think that query-performance will be significantly affected until reindexing is complete.
2. TTL Index
Instead of straight up replacing, use a time-to-live index to expire documents after the chosen replacement period. Insert new data every time period. This seems like a decent solution to me, except that for our specific application, old data is better than no data. In this scenario, if the cron job to repopulate the database fails for whatever reason, we could potentially be left with an empty coll_1 which is undesirable. I think this might have a negligible effect, but this solution also requires on-the-fly indexing as every document is inserted.
3. Communicate current database to read-clients
Simply use two different databases (or collections?) and inform connected clients which one is more recent. This solution would allow for finishing indexing the new coll_1_alt (and then coll_1 again) before making it available. I personally dislike the solution since it couples the read clients very closely to the database itself, and of course communication channels are always imperfect.
4. copyDatabase
Use copyDatabase to rename (designate) an alternate database db_tmp to db_1.db_tmp would also have a collection coll_1. Once reindexing is complete on db_tmp.coll_1, copyDatabase could be used to simply rename db_tmp to db_1. It seems that this would require droppping db_1 before renaming, leaving a window in which data won't be accessible.
Ideally (and naively), I'd just set db_1 to be something akin to a symlink, switching to the most current database as needed.
Anyone has good suggestions on how to achieve the desired effect?
*There are about 10 million documents in coll_1.
** The current plan is to replace the collection once every 24 hours. The replacement interval might get as low as once every 30 minutes, but not lower.
The problem that you point out in option 4 you will also have with option 1. dropTarget will also mean that the collection is not available.
Another alternative could be to just have both the old and the new data in the same collection, and use a "version ID" that you then still have to communicate to your clients to do a query on. That at least stops you from having to do reindexing like you pointed out for option 1.
I think your best bet is actually option 3, and it's the most equivalent to changing a symlink, except it is on the client side.

Lucene searches are slow via AzureDirectory

I'm having trouble understanding the complexities of Lucene. Any help would be appreciated.
We're using a Windows Azure blob to store our Lucene index, with Lucene.Net and AzureDirectory. A WorkerRole contains the only IndexWriter, and it adds 20,000 or more records a day, and changes a small number (fewer than 100) of the existing documents. A WebRole on a different box is set up to take two snapshots of the index (into another AzureDirectory), alternating between the two, and telling the WebService which directory to use as it becomes available.
The WebService has two IndexSearchers that alternate, reloading as the next snapshot is ready--one IndexSearcher is supposed to handle all client requests at a time (until the newer snapshot is ready). The IndexSearcher sometimes takes a long time (minutes) to instantiate, and other times it's very fast (a few seconds). Since the directory is physically on disk already (not using the blob at this stage), we expected it to be a fast operation, so this is one confusing point.
We're currently up around 8 million records. The Lucene search used to be so fast (it was great), but now it's very slow. To try to improve this, we've started to IndexWriter.Optimize the index once a day after we back it up--some resources online indicated that Optimize is not required for often-changing indexes, but other resources indicate that optimization is required, so we're not sure.
The big problem is that whenever our web site has more traffic than a single user, we're getting timeouts on the Lucene search. We're trying to figure out if there's a bottleneck at the IndexSearcher object. It's supposed to be thread-safe, but it seems like something is blocking the requests so that only a single search is performed at a time. The box is an Azure VM, set to a Medium size so it has lots of resources available.
Thanks for whatever insight you can provide. Obviously, I can provide more detail if you have any further questions, but I think this is a good start.
I have much larger indexes and have not run into these issues (~100 million records).
Put the indexes in memory if you can (8 million records sounds like it should fit into memory depending on the amount of analyzed fields etc.) You can use the RamDirectory as the cache directory
IndexSearcher is thread-safe and supposed to be re-used, but I am not sure if that is the reality. In Lucene 3.5 (Java version) they have a SearcherManager class that manages multiple threads for you.
http://java.dzone.com/news/lucenes-searchermanager
Also a non-Lucene post, if you are on an extra-large+ VM make sure you are taking advantage of all of the cores. Especially if you have an Web API/ASP.NET front-end for it, those calls all should be asynchronous.