I notice a severe degradation in Cassandra write performance with continuous writes over time.
I am inserting time series data with time stamp (T) as the column name in a wide column that stores 24 hours worth of data in a single row.
Streaming data is written from data generator (4 instances, each with 256 threads) inserting data into multiple rows in parallel.
Additionally, data is also inserted into a column family that has indexes over DateType and UUIDType.
CF1:
Col1 | Col2 | Col3(DateType) | Col(UUIDType4) |
RowKey1
RowKey2
:
:
CF2 (Wide column family):
RowKey1 (T1, V1) (T2, V3) (T4, V4) ......
RowKey2 (T1, V1) (T3, V3) .....
:
:
The no. of data points inserted/sec decreases over time until no further inserts are possible. The initial performance is of the order of 60000 ops/sec for ~6-8 hours and then it gradually tapers down to 0 ops/sec. Restarting the DataStax_Cassandra_Community_Server on all nodes helps restore the original throughput, but the behaviour is observed again after a few hours.
OS: Windows Server 2008
No.of nodes: 5
Cassandra version: DataStax Community 1.2.3
RAM: 8GB
HeapSize: 3GB
Garbage collector: default settings [ParNewGC]
I also notice a phenomenal increase in the no. of Pending write requests as reported by the OpsCenter (~of magnitude 200,000) when the performance begins to degrade.
I fail to understand what is preventing the write operations to be completed and why do they pile up over time? I do not see anything suspicious in the Cassandra logs.
Has the OS settings got anything to do with this?
Any suggestions to probe this issue further?
Do you see an increase in pending compactions (nodetool compactionstats)? Or are you seeing blocked flush writers (nodetool tpstats)? I'm guessing you're writing data to Cassandra faster than it can be consumed.
Cassandra won't block on writes, but that doesn't mean that you won't see an increase in the amount of heap used. Pending writes have overhead, as do blocked memtables. In addition, each SSTable has some memory overhead. If compactions fall behind this is magnified. At some point you probably don't have enough headroom in your heap to allocate the objects required for a single write, and you end up spending all your time waiting for an allocation that the GC can't provide.
With increased total capacity, or more IO on the machines consuming the data you would be able to sustain this write rate, but everything indicates you don't have enough capacity to sustain that load over time.
Bringing your write timeout in line with the new default in 2.0 (of 2s instead of 10s) will help with your write backlog by allowing load shedding to kick in faster: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-6059
Related
NOTE: Found the root cause in application code using hazelcast which started to execute after 15 min, the code retrieved almost entire data, so the issue NOT in hazelcast, leaving the question here if anyone will see same side effect or wrong code.
What can cause heavy traffic between Hazelcast (v3.12.12, also tried 4.1.1) 2 nodes ?
It holds maps with lot of data, no new entries are added/removed within that time, only map values are updated.
Java 11, Memory usage 1.5GB out of 12GB, no full GCs identified.
Following JFR the high IO is from:
com.hazelcast.internal.networking.nio.NioThread.processTaskQueue()
Below chart of Network IO, 15 min after start traffic jumps from 15 to 60 MB. From application perspective nothing changed after these 15 min.
This smells garbage collection, you are most likely to be running into long gc pauses. Check your gc logs, which you can enable using verbose gc settings on all members. If there are back-to-back GCs then you should do various things:
increase the heap size
tune your gc, I'd look into G1 (with -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis set to a reasonable number) and/or ZGC.
I'm getting the following error in the application logs that trying to connect to a Cassandra cluster with 6 nodes
com.datastax.driver.core.exceptions.OperationTimedOutException: [DB1:9042] Timed out waiting for server response
I have set java heap memory to 8GB (-Xms8G -Xmx8G), wondering if 8 GB is too much?
Below is time out configuration in cassandra.yaml
read_request_timeout_in_ms: 10000
range_request_timeout_in_ms: 20000
write_request_timeout_in_ms: 10000
request_timeout_in_ms: 20000
In the application there aren't heavy delete or update statements, so my question is what else may cause the long GC pause? the majority types of the GC pause that I can see in the log is G1 Evacuation Pause, what does it mean exactly?
The heap size heavily depends on the amount of data that you need to process. Usually for production workload minimum of 16Gb was recommended. Also, G1 isn't very effective on the small heaps (less than 12Gb) - it's better to use default ParNewGC for such heap sizes, but you may need to tune GC to get better performance. Look into this blog post that explains tuning of the GC.
Regarding your question on the "G1 Evacuation Pause" - look into this blog posts: 1 and 2. Here is quote from 2nd post:
Evacuation Pause (G1 collection) in which live objects are copied from one set of regions (young OR young+old) to another set. It is a stop-the-world activity and all
the application threads are stopped at a safepoint during this time.
For you this means that you're filling regions very fast and regions are big, so it requires significant amount of time to copy data.
We are running a cassandra 2-node cluster .
The following is the latency stat for reads or writes when executed independently :
99% write avg write latency 99% read avg read latency GC time
545 .227 2816 1.793 2400
However,the total read time for the same batch set is almost 3 times worse when performing read and write in parallel(write latencies being almost unaffected).
99% read avg read latency GC time
4055 1.955 6851
There is not compaction recorded on the application keyspace - though we could see compaction on the system and system_schema tablespaces.
What may be causing the sizeable jump in read timings for the same sample set - when writes happen concurrent to read?
Another point to mention is that the bloom filter false positives is always 0 - which seems to indicate bloom filters are being used effectively.
Any pointers to investigate is appreciated.
The YCSB Endpoint benchmark would have you believe that Cassandra is the golden child of Nosql databases. However, recreating the results on our own boxes (8 cores with hyperthreading, 60 GB memory, 2 500 GB SSD), we are having dismal read throughput for workload b (read mostly, aka 95% read, 5% update).
The cassandra.yaml settings are exactly the same as the Endpoint settings, barring the different ip addresses, and our disk configuration (1 SSD for data, 1 for a commit log). While their throughput is ~38,000 operations per second, ours is ~16,000 regardless (relatively) of the threads/number of client nodes. I.e. one worker node with 256 threads will report ~16,000 ops/sec, while 4 nodes will each report ~4,000 ops/sec
I've set the readahead value to 8KB for the SSD data drive. I'll put the custom workload file below.
When analyzing disk io & cpu usage with iostat, it seems that the reading throughput is consistently ~200,000 KB/s, which seems to suggest that the ycsb cluster throughput should be higher (records are 100 bytes). ~25-30% of cpu seems to be under %iowait, 10-25% in use by the user.
top and nload stats are not ostensibly bottlenecked (<50% memory usage, and 10-50 Mbits/sec for a 10 Gb/s link).
# The name of the workload class to use
workload=com.yahoo.ycsb.workloads.CoreWorkload
# There is no default setting for recordcount but it is
# required to be set.
# The number of records in the table to be inserted in
# the load phase or the number of records already in the
# table before the run phase.
recordcount=2000000000
# There is no default setting for operationcount but it is
# required to be set.
# The number of operations to use during the run phase.
operationcount=9000000
# The offset of the first insertion
insertstart=0
insertcount=500000000
core_workload_insertion_retry_limit = 10
core_workload_insertion_retry_interval = 1
# The number of fields in a record
fieldcount=10
# The size of each field (in bytes)
fieldlength=10
# Should read all fields
readallfields=true
# Should write all fields on update
writeallfields=false
fieldlengthdistribution=constant
readproportion=0.95
updateproportion=0.05
insertproportion=0
readmodifywriteproportion=0
scanproportion=0
maxscanlength=1000
scanlengthdistribution=uniform
insertorder=hashed
requestdistribution=zipfian
hotspotdatafraction=0.2
hotspotopnfraction=0.8
table=usertable
measurementtype=histogram
histogram.buckets=1000
timeseries.granularity=1000
The key was increasing native_transport_max_threads in the casssandra.yaml file.
Along with the increased settings in the comment (increasing connections in ycsb client as well as concurrent read/writes in cassandra), Cassandra jumped to ~80,000 ops/sec.
Setup:
We have 3 nodes Cassandra cluster having data of around 850G on each node, we have LVM setup for Cassandra data directory (currently consisting 3 drives 800G + 100G + 100G) and have separate volume (non LVM) for cassandra_logs
Versions:
Cassandra v2.0.14.425
DSE v4.6.6-1
Issue:
After adding 3rd (100G) volume in LVM on each of the node, all the nodes went very high in disk I/O and they go down quite often, servers also become inaccessible and we need to reboot the servers, servers don't get stable and we need to reboot after every 10 - 15 mins.
Other Info:
We have DSE recommended server settings (vm.max_map_count, file descriptor) configured on all nodes
RAM on each node : 24G
CPU on each node : 6 cores / 2600MHz
Disk on each node : 1000G (Data dir) / 8G (Logs)
As I suspected, you are having throughput problems on your disk. Here's what I looked at to give you background. The nodetool tpstats output from your three nodes had these lines:
Pool Name Active Pending Completed Blocked All time blocked
FlushWriter 0 0 22 0 8
FlushWriter 0 0 80 0 6
FlushWriter 0 0 38 0 9
The column I'm concerned about is the All Time Blocked. As a ratio to completed, you have a lot of blocking. The flushwriter is responsible for flushing memtables to the disk to keep the JVM from running out of memory or creating massive GC problems. The memtable is an in-memory representation of your tables. As your nodes take more writes, they start to fill and need to be flushed. That operation is a long sequential write to disk. Bookmark that. I'll come back to it.
When flushwriters are blocked, the heap starts to fill. If they stay blocked, you will see the requests starting to queue up and eventually the node will OOM.
Compaction might be running as well. Compaction is a long sequential read of SSTables into memory and then a long sequential flush of the merge sorted results. More sequential IO.
So all these operations on disk are sequential. Not random IOPs. If your disk is not able to handle simultaneous sequential read and write, IOWait shoots up, requests get blocked and then Cassandra has a really bad day.
You mentioned you are using Ceph. I haven't seen a successful deployment of Cassandra on Ceph yet. It will hold up for a while and then tip over on sequential load. Your easiest solution in the short term is to add more nodes to spread out the load. The medium term is to find some ways to optimize your stack for sequential disk loads, but that will eventually fail. Long term is get your data on real disks and off shared storage.
I have told this to consulting clients for years when using Cassandra "If your storage has an ethernet plug, you are doing it wrong" Good rule of thumb.