I have a database that hasn't been compacted in a while so its disk size is much larger than actual data and index sizes. I'll be moving it to another database and would like to know:
would compacting speed up mongodump
does mongorestore rebuild the database in a compact way negating the
need to compact
Compact + dump should be longer than a single dump since compact in the first run will operate on the same non-compact data.
Yes, it rebuilds the database in a compact way and also releases physical disk space. Simple compact will decrease data size only, but disk space still will be allocated by Mongo (you will not be able to use it for other purposes).
Related
I just made an pg_dump backup from my database and its size is about 95GB but the size of the direcory /pgsql/data is about 38GB.
I run a vacuum FULL and the size of the dump does not change. The version of my postgres installation is 9.3.4, on a CentOS release 6.3 server.
It is very weird the size of the dump comparing with the physical size or I can consider this normal?
Thanks in advance!
Regards.
Neme.
The size of pg_dump output and the size of a Postgres cluster (aka 'instance') on disk have very, very little correlation. Consider:
pg_dump has 3 different output formats, 2 of which allow compression on-the-fly
pg_dump output contains only schema definition and raw data in a text (or possibly "binary" format). It contains no index data.
The text/"binary" representation of different data types can be larger or smaller than actual data stored in the database. For example, the number 1 stored in a bigint field will take 8 bytes in a cluster, but only 1 byte in pg_dump.
This is also why VACUUM FULL had no effect on the size of the backup.
Note that a Point In Time Recovery (PITR) based backup is entirely different from a pg_dump backup. PITR backups are essentially copies of the data on disk.
Postgres does compress its data in certain situations, using a technique called TOAST:
PostgreSQL uses a fixed page size (commonly 8 kB), and does not allow tuples to span multiple pages. Therefore, it is not possible to store very large field values directly. To overcome this limitation, large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows. This happens transparently to the user, with only small impact on most of the backend code. The technique is affectionately known as TOAST (or "the best thing since sliced bread").
On my first server I get:
root#prod ~ # du -hs /var/lib/mongodb/
909G /var/lib/mongodb/
After migration this database with mongodump/mongorestore
On my second server I get:
root#prod ~ # du -hs /var/lib/mongodb/
30G /var/lib/mongodb/
After I waited a few hours, mongo finished indexing I got:
root#prod ~ # du -hs /var/lib/mongodb/
54G /var/lib/mongodb/
I tested database and there's no corrupted or missed data.
Why there's so big difference in size before and after migration?
MongoDB does not recover disk space when actually data size drops due to data deletion along with other causes. There's a decent explanation in the online docs:
Why are the files in my data directory larger than the data in my database?
The data files in your data directory, which is the /data/db directory
in default configurations, might be larger than the data set inserted
into the database. Consider the following possible causes:
Preallocated data files.
In the data directory, MongoDB preallocates data files to a particular
size, in part to prevent file system fragmentation. MongoDB names the
first data file .0, the next .1, etc. The
first file mongod allocates is 64 megabytes, the next 128 megabytes,
and so on, up to 2 gigabytes, at which point all subsequent files are
2 gigabytes. The data files include files with allocated space but
that hold no data. mongod may allocate a 1 gigabyte data file that may
be 90% empty. For most larger databases, unused allocated space is
small compared to the database.
On Unix-like systems, mongod preallocates an additional data file and
initializes the disk space to 0. Preallocating data files in the
background prevents significant delays when a new database file is
next allocated.
You can disable preallocation by setting preallocDataFiles to false.
However do not disable preallocDataFiles for production environments:
only use preallocDataFiles for testing and with small data sets where
you frequently drop databases.
On Linux systems you can use hdparm to get an idea of how costly
allocation might be:
time hdparm --fallocate $((1024*1024)) testfile
The oplog.
If this mongod is a member of a replica set, the data directory
includes the oplog.rs file, which is a preallocated capped collection
in the local database. The default allocation is approximately 5% of
disk space on 64-bit installations, see Oplog Sizing for more
information. In most cases, you should not need to resize the oplog.
However, if you do, see Change the Size of the Oplog.
The journal.
The data directory contains the journal files, which store write
operations on disk prior to MongoDB applying them to databases. See
Journaling Mechanics.
Empty records.
MongoDB maintains lists of empty records in data files when deleting
documents and collections. MongoDB can reuse this space, but will
never return this space to the operating system.
To de-fragment allocated storage, use compact, which de-fragments
allocated space. By de-fragmenting storage, MongoDB can effectively
use the allocated space. compact requires up to 2 gigabytes of extra
disk space to run. Do not use compact if you are critically low on
disk space.
Important
compact only removes fragmentation from MongoDB data files and does
not return any disk space to the operating system.
To reclaim deleted space, use repairDatabase, which rebuilds the
database which de-fragments the storage and may release space to the
operating system. repairDatabase requires up to 2 gigabytes of extra
disk space to run. Do not use repairDatabase if you are critically low
on disk space.
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/storage/
What they don't tell you are the two other ways to restore/recover disk space - mongodump/mongorestore as you did or adding a new member to the replica set with an empty disk so that it writes it's databsae files from scratch.
If you are interested in monitoring this, the db.stats() command returns a wealth of data on data, index, storage and file sizes:
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/command/dbStats/
Over time the MongoDB files develop fragmentation. When you do a "migration", or whack the data directory and force a re-sync, the files pack down. If your application does a lot of deletes or updates which grow the documents fragmentation develops fairly quickly. In our deployment it is updates that grow the documents that causes this. Somehow MongoDB moves the document when it sees that the updated document can't fit in the space of the original document. There is some way to add padding factors to the collection to avoid this.
Can any one tell me how to stop mongo DB from creating backup restores ?
If my DB name is "Database"
It is creating backups like
DataBase1
Database2
Database3
.
.
.
DataBase.ns
I want to use only working copy
MongoDB allocates data files like this:
First, a namespace file (mydb.ns) and a data file with 64MB (mydb.0). If the required space grows larger, it will add a 128MB file (mydb.1) and continuing like this, doubling the file size every time until the files are 2GB each (mydb.5 and following).
This is a somewhat aggressive allocation pattern. If you perform a lot of in-place updates and deletes, your datafiles can fragment severely. Running the repair database command via db.runCommand({repairDatabase:1}) can help, but it requires even more disk space while it runs and it stalls writes to the DB. Make sure to carefully read the documentation first.
Before you do that, run db.stats(), then compare dataSize (the amount of data you actually stored), storageSize (the allocated size including padding, but w/o indexes), and fileSize (the disk space allocated). If the differences are huge (factors of > 3), repair will probably reclaim quite a bit of disk space. If not, it can't help you because it can't magically shrink your data.
I am trying to store records with a set of doubles and ints (around 15-20) in mongoDB. The records mostly (99.99%) have the same structure.
When I store the data in a root which is a very structured data storing format, the file is around 2.5GB for 22.5 Million records. For Mongo, however, the database size (from command show dbs) is around 21GB, whereas the data size (from db.collection.stats()) is around 13GB.
This is a huge overhead (Clarify: 13GB vs 2.5GB, I'm not even talking about the 21GB), and I guess it is because it stores both keys and values. So the question is, why and how Mongo doesn't do a better job in making it smaller?
But the main question is, what is the performance impact in this? I have 4 indexes and they come out to be 3GB, so running the server on a single 8GB machine can become a problem if I double the amount of data and try to keep a large working set in memory.
Any guesses into if I should be using SQL or some other DB? or maybe just keep working with ROOT files if anyone has tried them?
Basically, this is mongo preparing for the insertion of data. Mongo performs prealocation of storage for data to prevent (or minimize) fragmentation on the disk. This prealocation is observed in the form of a file that the mongod instance creates.
First it creates a 64MB file, next 128MB, next 512MB, and on and on until it reaches files of 2GB (the maximum size of prealocated data files).
There are some more things that mongo does that might be suspect to using more disk space, things like journaling...
For much, much more info on how mongoDB uses storage space, you can take a look at this page and in specific the section titled Why are the files in my data directory larger than the data in my database?
There are some things that you can do to minimize the space that is used, but these tequniques (such as using the --smallfiles option) are usually only recommended for development and testing use - never for production.
Question: Should you use SQL or MongoDB?
Answer: It depends.
Better way to ask the question: Should you use use a relational database or a document database?
Answer:
If your data is highly structured (every row has the same fields), or you rely heavily on foreign keys and you need strong transactional integrity on operations that use those related records... use a relational database.
If your records are heterogeneous (different fields per document) or have variable length fields (arrays) or have embedded documents (hierarchical)... use a document database.
My current software project uses both. Use the right tool for the job!
I just installed MongoDB 2.0 and tried to run the compact command instead of the repair command in earlier versions. My database is empty at the moment, meaning there is only one collection with 0 entries and the two system collections (indices, users). Currently the db takes about 4 GB of space on the harddisk. The db is used as a temp queue with all items being removes after they have been processed.
I tried to run the following in the mongo shell.
use mydb
db.theOnlyCollection.runCommand("compact")
It returns with
ok: 1
But still the same space is taken on the harddisk. I tried to compact the system collections as well, but this did not work.
When I run the normal repair command
db.repairDatabase()
the database is compacted and only takes 400 MB.
Anyone has an idea why the compact command is not working?
Thanks a lot for your help.
Best
Alex
Collection compaction is not supposed to decrease the size of data files. Main point is to defragment collection and index data - combine unused space gaps into continuous space allowing new data to be stored there. Moreover it may actually increase the size of data files:
Compaction may increase the total size of your data files by up to 2GB. Even in this case, total collection storage space will decrease.
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/compact+Command#compactCommand-Effectsofacompaction