MongoDB Insert performance - Huge table with a couple of Indexes - mongodb

I am testing Mongo DB to be used in a database with a huge table of about 30 billion records of about 200 bytes each. I understand that Sharding is needed for that kind of volume, so I am trying to get 1 to 2 billion records on one machine. I have reached 1 billion records on a machine with 2 CPU's / 6 cores each, and 64 GB of RAM. I mongoimport-ed without indexes, and speed was okay (average 14k records/s). I added indexes, which took a very long time, but that is okay as it is a one time thing. Now inserting new records into the database is taking a very long time. As far as I can tell, the machine is not loaded while inserting records (CPU, RAM, and I/O are in good shape). How is it possible to speed -up inserting new records?

I would recommend adding this host to MMS (http://mms.10gen.com/help/overview.html#installation) - make sure you install with munin-node support and that will give you the most information. This will allow you to track what might be slowing you down. Sorry I can't be more specific in the answer, but there are many, many possible explanations here. Some general points:
Adding indexes means that that the indexes as well as your working data set will be in RAM now, this may have strained your resources (look for page faults)
Now that you have indexes, they must be updated when you are inserting - if everything fits in RAM this should be OK, see first point
You should also check your Disk IO to see how that is performing - how does your background flush average look?
Are you running the correct filesystem (XFS, ext4) and a kernel version later than 2.6.25? (earlier versions have issues with fallocate())
Some good general information for follow up can be found here:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Notes

Related

What about expected performance in Pentaho?

I am using Pentaho to create ETL's and I am very focused on performance. I develop an ETL process that copy 163.000.000 rows from Sql server 2088 to PostgreSQL and it takes 17h.
I do not know how good or bad is this performance. Do you know how to measure if the time that takes some process is good? At least as a reference to know if I need to keep working heavily on performance or not.
Furthermore, I would like to know if it is normal that in the first 2 minutes of ETL process it load 2M rows. I calculate how long will take to load all the rows. The expected result is 6 hours, but then the performance decrease and it takes 17h.
I have been investigating in goole and I do not find any time references neither any explanations about performance.
Divide and conquer, and proceed by elimination.
First, add a LIMIT to your query so it takes 10 minutes instead of 17 hours, this will make it a lot easier to try different things.
Are the processes running on different machines? If so, measure network bandwidth utilization to make sure it isn't a bottleneck. Transfer a huge file, make sure the bandwidth is really there.
Are the processes running on the same machine? Maybe one is starving the other for IO. Are source and destination the same hard drive? Different hard drives? SSDs? You need to explain...
Examine IO and CPU usage of both processes. Does one process max out one cpu core?
Does a process max out one of the disks? Check iowait, iops, IO bandwidth, etc.
How many columns? Two INTs, 500 FLOATs, or a huge BLOB with a 12 megabyte PDF in each row? Performance would vary between these cases...
Now, I will assume the problem is on the POSTGRES side.
Create a dummy table, identical to your target table, which has:
Exact same columns (CREATE TABLE dummy LIKE table)
No indexes, No constraints (I think it is the default, double check the created table)
BEFORE INSERT trigger on it which returns NULL and drop the row.
The rows will be processed, just not inserted.
Is it fast now? OK, so the problem was insertion.
Do it again, but this time using an UNLOGGED TABLE (or a TEMPORARY TABLE). These do not have any crash-resistance because they don't use the journal, but for importing data it's OK.... if it crashes during the insert you're gonna wipe it out and restart anyway.
Still No indexes, No constraints. Is it fast?
If slow => IO write bandwidth issue, possibly caused by something else hitting the disks
If fast => IO is OK, problem not found yet!
With the table loaded with data, add indexes and constraints one by one, find out if you got, say, a CHECK that uses a slow SQL function, or a FK into a table which has no index, that kind of stuff. Just check how long it takes to create the constraint.
Note: on an import like this you would normally add indices and constraints after the import.
My gut feeling is that PG is checkpointing like crazy due to the large volume of data, due to too-low checkpointing settings in the config. Or some issue like that, probably random IO writes related. You put the WAL on a fast SSD, right?
17H is too much. Far too much. For 200 Million rows, 6 hours is even a lot.
Hints for optimization:
Check the memory size: edit the spoon.bat, find the line containing -Xmx and change it to half your machine memory size. Details varies with java version. Example for PDI V7.1.
Check if the query from the source database is not too long (because too complex, or server memory size, or ?).
Check the target commit size (try 25000 for PostgresSQL), the Use batch update for inserts in on, and also that the index and constraints are disabled.
Play with the Enable lazy conversion in the Table input. Warning, you may produce difficult to identify and debug errors due to data casting.
In the transformation property you can tune the Nr of rows in rowset (click anywhere, select Property, then the tab Miscelaneous). On the same tab check the transformation is NOT transactional.

Postgres running slow after indexing finished

My postgres was running really slow lately, an aggregation for a month it usually ended up taking more than 1 minute (to be more exact the last one took 7 mins and 23 secs).
Last friday i recreated the servers (master and replica) and reimported the database.
First thing I noticed is that from 133gb now the database is 42gb (the actual data is around 12gb, i guess the rest are the indexes).
Everything was fast as hell for a day, after that the indexing finished (26gb on indexes) and now I'm back to square 1.
A count on ~5 million rows takes 3 mins 42 secs.
Made the autovacuum more aggressive and it looks like it's doing it's job now but the DB is still slow.
I am using the db for an API so it's constantly growing. Atm i have 2 tables one that has around 5 mil rows and the other 28 mil.
So if the master has a lot of activity and let's say that i'm expecting some performance loss, i don't expect it from the replica.
What's curios is that after a restart it's really fast for an hour or so.
Also another thing that i noticed was that on every query I do the IO is 100% while the memory and cpu are almost not used at all.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Update
Same database on a smaller machine works like a charm.
Same queries, same indexes.
The only difference is the traffic, not writing or updating that much.
Also i forgot to mention one thing, one of my indexes is clustered.
The live machine is a 5 core with 64gb and 3k IO.
The test machine is a 2 core with 4gb and an SSD.
Update
Found my issue.
Apparently the autovacuum can't get a lock and by the time it gets it the dead tuples increased.
Made the autovacuum more aggresive for now and deleted a bunch of unused indexes.
Still don't know how to fix the lock issue tho.
Update
Looks like something is increasing the estimated row count.
Since my last update here the row count increased by 2 mil.
I guess that by tomorrow the row count will be again around 12 mil and the count will be slow as hell again.
Could this be related to autovacuum?
Update
Well found my issue.
Looks like postgres is losing a lot of speed on a write intensive database.
Had a column that was used as a flag and updated a lot of times per day.
Everything looks really good after the flag and update was removed.
Any clue on how to fix this issue on a write intensive table?
May be the following pointers help:
Are you really sure you want to do a 5mil row Aggregation for an API? Everytime ? Can't you split the data into chunks such that only a small number of chunks actually get most of the new rows (and so the aggregation of all the previous chunks can be reused for the next Query)? Time is one such measure, serial numbers could be another, etc. If so, partitioning the data is an obvious solution you should investigate, it really has a good chance of giving you sub-second query times (assuming you store aggregations for previous chunks smartly).
A hunch about that first hour magic is that although this data fits RAM, concurrent querying pushes that data-set out and then its purely disk I/O... and in that case, CPU / RAM being idle isn't a surprise.
Finally, I think this setup is asking for a re-design where there is only so much you could do with a single SQL, and in that expecting sub-second Query times for data that is not within RAM for a 5mil data-set is probably being too optimistic!
(Nonetheless, do post your findings, if possible)

MongoDB consumes a lot of memory

For more than a month is my war with mongoDB. Until I lose =] ...
Battle 1. Battle 2.
And now a new problem. Again, not enough memory.
Initially, this was solved by simply increasing the memory at a rate of VPS. Then journal = false. But now I got to the top of your plan and continue to increase the memory is not possible.
For my base are lacking 4 GB of memory.
How should I choose a database for the project, was nowhere written that there are so many mongoDB memory. With about 10 million records in the mongoDB missing 4 GB of memory, when my MySQL database with 10 million easily copes with 1.4 GB of memory.
The problem as I understand it, a large number of index fields. But since I can not log into the database, respectively, can not remove them. They needed me in the early stages of development, now they are not important to me.
Tell me please, can I remove them somehow?
There is a dump of the database is completely whole folder database / data / db
On my PC with 4 GB of memory database does not start on a VPS with 4GB same.
As an alternative, I think to take a test period at some VPS / VDS to run mongo and delete keys.
Do you know a web hosting with a test period and 6 GB of memory?
Or if there is an alternative, could you say what?
The issues has very little to do with the size of your data set. MongoDB uses memory mapped files for its storage engine. As such it'll start swapping in pages of hot data into memory when it can and it does so fairly aggressively (or more accurately, the OS memory management does).
Basically it uses as much memory as is available to it and there's very little you can do to avoid it. All data pages (be it actual data or indexes) that are accessed during operation will be swapped into memory if there is space available.
There are plenty of references to this on the internet and on mongodb.org by the way. Saying it isn't mentioned anywhere isn't really true.

Cassandra random read speed

We're still evaluating Cassandra for our data store. As a very simple test, I inserted a value for 4 columns into the Keyspace1/Standard1 column family on my local machine amounting to about 100 bytes of data. Then I read it back as fast as I could by row key. I can read it back at 160,000/second. Great.
Then I put in a million similar records all with keys in the form of X.Y where X in (1..10) and Y in (1..100,000) and I queried for a random record. Performance fell to 26,000 queries per second. This is still well above the number of queries we need to support (about 1,500/sec)
Finally I put ten million records in from 1.1 up through 10.1000000 and randomly queried for one of the 10 million records. Performance is abysmal at 60 queries per second and my disk is thrashing around like crazy.
I also verified that if I ask for a subset of the data, say the 1,000 records between 3,000,000 and 3,001,000, it returns slowly at first and then as they cache, it speeds right up to 20,000 queries per second and my disk stops going crazy.
I've read all over that people are storing billions of records in Cassandra and fetching them at 5-6k per second, but I can't get anywhere near that with only 10mil records. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Is there some setting I need to change from the defaults? I'm on an overclocked Core i7 box with 6gigs of ram so I don't think it's the machine.
Here's my code to fetch records which I'm spawning into 8 threads to ask for one value from one column via row key:
ColumnPath cp = new ColumnPath();
cp.Column_family = "Standard1";
cp.Column = utf8Encoding.GetBytes("site");
string key = (1+sRand.Next(9)) + "." + (1+sRand.Next(1000000));
ColumnOrSuperColumn logline = client.get("Keyspace1", key, cp, ConsistencyLevel.ONE);
Thanks for any insights
purely random reads is about worst-case behavior for the caching that your OS (and Cassandra if you set up key or row cache) tries to do.
if you look at contrib/py_stress in the Cassandra source distribution, it has a configurable stdev to perform random reads but with some keys hotter than others. this will be more representative of most real-world workloads.
Add more Cassandra nodes and give them lots of memory (-Xms / -Xmx). The more Cassandra instances you have, the data will be partitioned across the nodes and much more likely to be in memory or more easily accessed from disk. You'll be very limited with trying to scale a single workstation class CPU. Also, check the default -Xms/-Xmx setting. I think the default is 1GB.
It looks like you haven't got enough RAM to store all the records in memory.
If you swap to disk then you are in trouble, and performance is expected to drop significantly, especially if you are random reading.
You could also try benchmarking some other popular alternatives, like Redis or VoltDB.
VoltDB can certainly handle this level of read performance as well as writes and operates using a cluster of servers. As an in-memory solution you need to build a large enough cluster to hold all of your data in RAM.

Configuration Recommendations for a PostgreSQL Installation

I have a Windows Server 2003 machine which I will be using as a Postgres database server, the machine is a Dual Core 3.0Ghz Xeon with 4 GB ECC Memory and 4 x 120GB 10K RPM SAS Drives, all stripped.
I have read that the default Postgres install is configured to run nicely on a 486 with 32MB RAM, and I have read several web pages about configuration optimizations - but was hoping for something more concrete from my Stackoverflow peeps.
Generally, its only going to serve 1 database (potentially one or two more) but the catch is that the database has 1 table in particular which is massive (hundreds of millions of records with only a few coloumn). Presently, with the default configuration, it's not slow, but I think it could potentially be even faster.
Can people please give me some guidance and recomendations for configuration settings which you would use for a server such as this.
4*stripped drive was a bad idea — if any of this drives will fail then you'll loose all data, and even SAS drives sometimes fail — with 4 drivers it is 4 times more likely than with 1 drive; you should go for RAID 1+0.
Use the latest version of Postgres, 8.3.7 now; there are many performance improvements in every major version.
Set shared_buffers parameter in postgresql.conf to about 1/4 of your memory.
Set effective_cache_size to about 1/2 of your memory.
Set checkpoint_segments to about 32 (checkpoint every 512MB) and checkpoint_completion_target to about 0.8.
Set default_statistics_target to about 100.
Migrate to Enterprise Linux or FreeBSD: Postgres works much better on Unix type systems — Windows support is a recent addition, not very mature.
You can read more on this page: Tuning Your PostgreSQL Server — PostgreSQL Wiki
My experience suggests that (within limits) the hardware is typically the least important factor in database performance.
Assuming that you have enough memory to keep commonly used data in cache, then your CPU speed may vary 10-50% between a top-of the line machine and a common or garden box.
However, a missing index in an important search, or a poorly written recursive trigger could easily make a difference of 1,000% or 10,000% or more in your response times.
Without knowing exactly your table structure and row counts, I think anybody would suggest that your your hardware looks amply sufficient. It is only your database structure which will kill you. :)
UPDATE:
Without knowing the specific queries and your index details, there's not much more we can do. And in general, even knowing the queries, it's often very difficult to optimize without actually installing and running the queries with realistic data sets.
Given the cost of the server, and the cost of your time, I think you need to invest thirty bucks in a book. Then install your database with test data, run the queries, and see what runs well and what runs badly. Fix, rinse, and repeat.
Both of these books are specific to SQL Server and both have high ratings:
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Microsoft%C2%AE-SQL-Server-2005/dp/0735621969/ref=sr_1_1
http://www.amazon.com/Server-Performance-Tuning-Distilled-Second/dp/B001GAQ53E/ref=sr_1_5