Items stored in Memcached seem to disappear without reason (TTL: 86400 but sometimes gone within 60s). However there's enough free space, and stats give zero evictions.
The items that get lost seem to be the larger items. They seem to disappear after adding some other big items. Could it be the case "The slab" for larger items is full and items are being evicted without being reported?
Memcached version 1.4.5.
Keys can get evicted before their expiration in memcached; this is a side effect of how memcached handles memory (see this answer for more details).
If the items you are storing are large enough that this is becoming a problem, memcached may be the wrong tool for the task you are trying to perform. You essentially have 2 practical options in this scenario:
break down the data you're trying to cache in smaller chunks
if this isn't feasible for any reason, you will have to use some sort of permanent storage, the nature of which will be dependent on the nature of data you're trying to store (choices would include redis, mongodb, SQL database, filesystem, etc.)
Related
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?
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.
I am using "value eviction" for deleting data from RAM. Is there a way to find the oldest document with both data + metadata in the bucket (in RAM)?
No, there is no way to do what you're asking, because Couchbase doesn't expose these internal parameters. However, perhaps there is another way to accomplish whatever it is you're trying to do. Could you please describe what you want to accomplish?
Edited in response to the comment below:
As a general rule, you should use the default (value eviction) unless you have a compelling reason to switch to full eviction. Even though, ostensibly, you "save" more RAM by using full eviction, you're actually trading off performance on some operations that will now have to hit the disk instead of returning a response from memory. Specifically, cache misses or existence checks are more expensive (IO-wise), as well as some types of update operations.
Some cases where you would consider using full eviction are when your dataset is much larger than your working set (i.e the 'hot' data that's accessed frequently and should be in cache), or when you have to store a very large number of small values, such as when keeping a mapping of GUID-to-GUID, which means that the value is actually smaller than the metadata+key.
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.
I am trying to understand what would be the need to go with a solution like memcached. It may seem like a silly question - but what does it bring to the table if all I need is to cache objects? Won't a simple hashmap do ?
Quoting from the memcache web site, memcache is…
Free & open source, high-performance,
distributed memory object caching
system, generic in nature, but
intended for use in speeding up
dynamic web applications by
alleviating database load.
Memcached is an in-memory key-value
store for small chunks of arbitrary
data (strings, objects) from results
of database calls, API calls, or page
rendering. Memcached is simple yet
powerful. Its simple design promotes
quick deployment, ease of development,
and solves many problems facing large
data caches. Its API is available for
most popular languages.
At heart it is a simple Key/Value
store
A key word here is distributed. In general, quoting from the memcache site again,
Memcached servers are generally
unaware of each other. There is no
crosstalk, no syncronization, no
broadcasting. The lack of
interconnections means adding more
servers will usually add more capacity
as you expect. There might be
exceptions to this rule, but they are
exceptions and carefully regarded.
I would highly recommend reading the detailed description of memcache.
Where are you going to put this hashmap? That's what it's doing for you. Any structure you implement on PHP is only there until the request ends. If you throw stuff in a persistent cache, you can fetch it back out for other requests, instead of rebuilding the data.
I know that this question is rather old, but in addition to being able to share a cache across multiple servers, there is also another aspect that is not mentioned in other answers and is the values expiration.
If you store the values in a HashMap, and that HashMap is bound to the Application context, it will keep growing in size, unless you expire items in some ways. Memcached expires object lazily for maximum performance.
When an item is added to the memcache, it can have an expiration time, for instance 600 seconds. After the object is expired it will just remain there, but if another object asks for it, it will purge it and return null.
Similarly, when memcached memory is full, it will look for the first expired item of adequate size and expire it to make room for the new item. Lastly, it can also happen that the cache is full and there isn't any item to expire, in which case it will replace the least used items.
Using a fully flagded cache system usually allow you to replicate the cache on many servers, or just scale to many server just to scale a lot of parallel requestes, all this remaining acceptable fast in term of reply.
There is an (old) article that compares different caching systems used by php:
https://www.percona.com/blog/2006/08/09/cache-performance-comparison/
Basically, file caching is faster than memcached.
So to answer the question, I believe you would have better performances using a file based cache system.
Here are the results from the tests of the article:
Cache Type Cache Gets/sec
Array Cache 365000
APC Cache 98000
File Cache 27000
Memcached Cache (TCP/IP) 12200
MySQL Query Cache (TCP/IP) 9900
MySQL Query Cache (Unix Socket) 13500
Selecting from table (TCP/IP) 5100
Selecting from table (Unix Socket) 7400