Cassandra Pycassa connection pool, how to use properly? - cassandra

In order to get a Cassandra insert going faster I'm using multithreading, its working ok, but if I add more threads it doesnt make any difference, I think I'm not generating more connections, I think maybe I should be using pool.execute(f, *args, **kwargs) but I dont know how to use it, the documentation is quite scanty. Heres my code so far..
import connect_to_ks_bp
from connect_to_ks_bp import ks_refs
import time
import pycassa
from datetime import datetime
import json
import threadpool
pool = threadpool.ThreadPool(20)
count = 1
bench = open("benchCassp20_100000.txt", "w")
def process_tasks(lines):
#let threadpool format your requests into a list
requests = threadpool.makeRequests(insert_into_cfs, lines)
#insert the requests into the threadpool
for req in requests:
pool.putRequest(req)
pool.wait()
def read(file):
"""read data from json and insert into keyspace"""
json_data=open(file)
lines = []
for line in json_data:
lines.append(line)
print len(lines)
process_tasks(lines)
def insert_into_cfs(line):
global count
count +=1
if count > 5000:
bench.write(str(datetime.now())+"\n")
count = 1
#print count
#print kspool.checkedout()
"""
user_tweet_cf = pycassa.ColumnFamily(kspool, 'UserTweet')
user_name_cf = pycassa.ColumnFamily(kspool, 'UserName')
tweet_cf = pycassa.ColumnFamily(kspool, 'Tweet')
user_follower_cf = pycassa.ColumnFamily(kspool, 'UserFollower')
"""
tweet_data = json.loads(line)
"""Format the tweet time as an epoch seconds int value"""
tweet_time = time.strptime(tweet_data['created_at'],"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000")
tweet_time = int(time.mktime(tweet_time))
new_user_tweet(tweet_data['from_user_id'],tweet_time,tweet_data['id'])
new_user_name(tweet_data['from_user_id'],tweet_data['from_user_name'])
new_tweet(tweet_data['id'],tweet_data['text'],tweet_data['to_user_id'])
if tweet_data['to_user_id'] != 0:
new_user_follower(tweet_data['from_user_id'],tweet_data['to_user_id'])
""""4 functions below carry out the inserts into specific column families"""
def new_user_tweet(from_user_id,tweet_time,id):
ks_refs.user_tweet_cf.insert(from_user_id,{(tweet_time): id})
def new_user_name(from_user_id,user_name):
ks_refs.user_name_cf.insert(from_user_id,{'username': user_name})
def new_tweet(id,text,to_user_id):
ks_refs.tweet_cf.insert(id,{
'text': text
,'to_user_id': to_user_id
})
def new_user_follower(from_user_id,to_user_id):
ks_refs.user_follower_cf.insert(from_user_id,{to_user_id: 0})
read('tweets.json')
if __name__ == '__main__':
This is just another file..
import pycassa
from pycassa.pool import ConnectionPool
from pycassa.columnfamily import ColumnFamily
"""This is a static class I set up to hold the global database connection stuff,
I only want to connect once and then the various insert functions will use these fields a lot"""
class ks_refs():
pool = ConnectionPool('TweetsKS',use_threadlocal = True,max_overflow = -1)
#classmethod
def cf_connect(cls, column_family):
cf = pycassa.ColumnFamily(cls.pool, column_family)
return cf
ks_refs.user_name_cfo = ks_refs.cf_connect('UserName')
ks_refs.user_tweet_cfo = ks_refs.cf_connect('UserTweet')
ks_refs.tweet_cfo = ks_refs.cf_connect('Tweet')
ks_refs.user_follower_cfo = ks_refs.cf_connect('UserFollower')
#trying out a batch mutator whihc is supposed to increase performance
ks_refs.user_name_cf = ks_refs.user_name_cfo.batch(queue_size=10000)
ks_refs.user_tweet_cf = ks_refs.user_tweet_cfo.batch(queue_size=10000)
ks_refs.tweet_cf = ks_refs.tweet_cfo.batch(queue_size=10000)
ks_refs.user_follower_cf = ks_refs.user_follower_cfo.batch(queue_size=10000)

A few thoughts:
Batch sizes of 10,000 are way too large. Try 100.
Make your ConnectionPool size at least as large as the number of threads using the pool_size parameter. The default is 5. Pool overflow should only be used when the number of active threads may vary over time, not when you have a fixed number of threads. The reason is that it will result in a lot of unnecessary opening and closing of new connections, which is a fairly expensive process.
After you've resolved those issues, look into these:
I'm not familiar with the threadpool library that you're using. Make sure that if you take the insertions to Cassandra out of the picture that you see an increase in the performance when you increase the number of threads
Python itself has a limit to how many threads may be useful due to the GIL. It shouldn't normally max out at 20, but it might if you're doing something CPU intensive or something that requires a lot of Python interpretation. The test that I described in my previous point will cover this as well. It may be the case that you should consider using the multiprocessing module, but you would need some code changes to handle that (namely, not sharing ConnectionPools, CFs, or hardly anything else between processes).

Related

Thread objects not freed from memory

I wrote a continuous script that collects some data from the internet every few seconds, keeps it in memory for a while, periodically stores it all to db and then deletes it. To keep everything running smoothly I use threads to collect the data from several sources at the same time. To minimize db operations and to avoid conflict with other db processes, I only write every now and then.
The memory from the deleted variables is never returned and eventually becomes so large the script crashes (shown by tracemalloc and pympler). I guess I'm handling the data coming out of the threads wrong but I don't know how I could do it differently. Minimal example below.
Addition: I don't think I can use a queue because in reality multiple functions are threaded from this point, modifying different local variables.
import threading
import time
import tracemalloc
import pympler.muppy, pympler.summary
import gc
tracemalloc.start()
def a():
# collect data
collection.update({int(time.time()): list(range(1,1000))})
return
collection = {}
threads = []
start = time.time()
cycle = 0
while time.time() < start + 60:
cycle += 1
t = threading.Thread(target = a)
threads.append(t)
t.start()
time.sleep(1)
for t in threads:
if t.is_alive() == False:
t.join()
# periodically delete data
delete = []
for key, val in collection.items():
if key < time.time() - 10:
delete.append(key)
for delet in delete:
print('DELETING:', delet)
del collection[delet]
gc.collect()
print('CYCLE:', cycle, 'THREADS:', threading.active_count(), 'COLLECTION:', len(collection))
print(tracemalloc.get_traced_memory())
all_objects = pympler.muppy.get_objects()
sum1 = pympler.summary.summarize(all_objects)
pympler.summary.print_(sum1)

Python Threading Issue, Is this Right?

I am attempting to make a few thousand dns queries. I have written my script to use python-adns. I have attempted to add threading and queue's to ensure the script runs optimally and efficiently.
However, I can only achieve mediocre results. The responses are choppy/intermittent. They start and stop, and most times pause for 10 to 20 seconds.
tlock = threading.Lock()#printing to screen
def async_dns(i):
s = adns.init()
for i in names:
tlock.acquire()
q.put(s.synchronous(i, adns.rr.NS)[0])
response = q.get()
q.task_done()
if response == 0:
dot_net.append("Y")
print(i + ", is Y")
elif response == 300:
dot_net.append("N")
print(i + ", is N")
tlock.release()
q = queue.Queue()
threads = []
for i in range(100):
t = threading.Thread(target=async_dns, args=(i,))
threads.append(t)
t.start()
print(threads)
I have spent countless hours on this. I would appreciate some input from expedienced pythonista's . Is this a networking issue ? Can this bottleneck/intermittent responses be solved by switching servers ?
Thanks.
Without answers to the questions, I asked in comments above, I'm not sure how well I can diagnose the issue you're seeing, but here are some thoughts:
It looks like each thread is processing all names instead of just a portion of them.
Your Queue seems to be doing nothing at all.
Your lock seems to guarantee that you actually only do one query at a time (defeating the purpose of having multiple threads).
Rather than trying to fix up this code, might I suggest using multiprocessing.pool.ThreadPool instead? Below is a full working example. (You could use adns instead of socket if you want... I just couldn't easily get it installed and so stuck with the built-in socket.)
In my testing, I also sometimes see pauses; my assumption is that I'm getting throttled somewhere.
import itertools
from multiprocessing.pool import ThreadPool
import socket
import string
def is_available(host):
print('Testing {}'.format(host))
try:
socket.gethostbyname(host)
return False
except socket.gaierror:
return True
# Test the first 1000 three-letter .com hosts
hosts = [''.join(tla) + '.com' for tla in itertools.permutations(string.ascii_lowercase, 3)][:1000]
with ThreadPool(100) as p:
results = p.map(is_available, hosts)
for host, available in zip(hosts, results):
print('{} is {}'.format(host, 'available' if available else 'not available'))

How do I get improved pymongo performance using threading?

I'm trying to see performance improvements on pymongo, but I'm not observing any.
My sample db has 400,000 records. Essentially I'm seeing threaded and single threaded performance be equal - and the only performance gain coming from multiple process execution.
Does pymongo not release the GIL during queries?
Single Perf: real 0m0.618s
Multiproc:real 0m0.144s
Multithread:real 0m0.656s
Regular code:
choices = ['foo','bar','baz']
def regular_read(db, sample_choice):
rows = db.test_samples.find({'choice':sample_choice})
return 42 # done to remove calculations from the picture
def main():
client = MongoClient('localhost', 27017)
db = client['test-async']
for sample_choice in choices:
regular_read(db, sample_choice)
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
$ time python3 mongotest_read.py
real 0m0.618s
user 0m0.085s
sys 0m0.018s
Now when I use multiprocessing I can see some improvement.
from random import randint, choice
import functools
from pymongo import MongoClient
from concurrent import futures
choices = ['foo','bar','baz']
MAX_WORKERS = 4
def regular_read(sample_choice):
client = MongoClient('localhost', 27017,connect=False)
db = client['test-async']
rows = db.test_samples.find({'choice':sample_choice})
#return sum(r['data'] for r in rows)
return 42
def main():
f = functools.partial(regular_read)
with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor(MAX_WORKERS) as executor:
res = executor.map(f, choices)
print(list(res))
return len(list(res))
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
$ time python3 mongotest_proc_read.py
[42, 42, 42]
real 0m0.144s
user 0m0.106s
sys 0m0.041s
But when you switch from ProcessPoolExecutor to ThreadPoolExecutor the speed drops back to single threaded mode.
...
def main():
client = MongoClient('localhost', 27017,connect=False)
f = functools.partial(regular_read, client)
with futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(MAX_WORKERS) as executor:
res = executor.map(f, choices)
print(list(res))
return len(list(res))
$ time python3 mongotest_thread_read.py
[42, 42, 42]
real 0m0.656s
user 0m0.111s
sys 0m0.024s
...
PyMongo uses the standard Python socket module, which does drop the GIL while sending and receiving data over the network. However, it's not MongoDB or the network that's your bottleneck: it's Python.
CPU-intensive Python processes do not scale by adding threads; indeed they slow down slightly due to context-switching and other inefficiencies. To use more than one CPU in Python, start subprocesses.
I know it doesn't seem intuitive that a "find" should be CPU intensive, but the Python interpreter is slow enough to contradict our intuition. If the query is fast and there's no latency to MongoDB on localhost, MongoDB can easily outperform the Python client. The experiment you just ran, substituting subprocesses for threads, confirms that Python performance is the bottleneck.
To ensure maximum throughput, make sure you have C extensions enabled: pymongo.has_c() == True. With that in place, PyMongo runs as fast as a Python client library can achieve, to get more throughput go to multiprocessing.
If your expected real-world scenario involves more time-consuming queries, or a remote MongoDB with some network latency, multithreading may give you some performance increase.
You can use mongodb indexes to optimize your queries.
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/optimize-query-performance-with-indexes-and-projections/

What can be slowing down my program when i use multithreading?

I'm writing a program that downloads data from a website (eve-central.com). It returns xml when I send a GET request with some parameters. The problem is that I need to make about 7080 of such requests because i can't specify the typeid parameter more than once.
def get_data_eve_central(typeids, system, hours, minq=1, thread_count=1):
import xmltodict, urllib3
pool = urllib3.HTTPConnectionPool('api.eve-central.com')
for typeid in typeids:
r = pool.request('GET', '/api/quicklook', fields={'typeid': typeid, 'usesystem': system, 'sethours': hours, 'setminQ': minq})
answer = xmltodict.parse(r.data)
It was really slow when I just connected to the website and made all the requests so I decided to make it use multiple threads at a time (I read that if the process involves a lot of waiting (I/O, HTTP requests), it can be speeded up a lot with multithreading). I rewrote it using multiple threads, but it somehow isn't any faster (a bit slower in fact). Here's the code rewritten using multithreading:
def get_data_eve_central(all_typeids, system, hours, minq=1, thread_count=1):
if thread_count > len(all_typeids): raise NameError('TooManyThreads')
def requester(typeids):
pool = urllib3.HTTPConnectionPool('api.eve-central.com')
for typeid in typeids:
r = pool.request('GET', '/api/quicklook', fields={'typeid': typeid, 'usesystem': system, 'sethours': hours, 'setminQ': minq})
answer = xmltodict.parse(r.data)['evec_api']['quicklook']
answers.append(answer)
def chunkify(items, quantity):
chunk_len = len(items) // quantity
rest_count = len(items) % quantity
chunks = []
for i in range(quantity):
chunk = items[:chunk_len]
items = items[chunk_len:]
if rest_count and items:
chunk.append(items.pop(0))
rest_count -= 1
chunks.append(chunk)
return chunks
t = time.clock()
threads = []
answers = []
for typeids in chunkify(all_typeids, thread_count):
threads.append(threading.Thread(target=requester, args=[typeids]))
threads[-1].start()
threads[-1].join()
print(time.clock()-t)
return answers
What I do is I divide all typeids into as many chunks as the quantity of threads i want to use and create a thread for each chunk to process it. The question is: what can slow it down? (I apologise for my bad english)
Python has Global Interpreter Lock. It can be your problem. Actually Python cannot do it in a genuine parallel way. You may think about switching to other languages or staying with Python but use process-based parallelism to solve your task. Here is a nice presentation Inside the Python GIL

Multithreading in Python/BeautifulSoup scraping doesn't speed up at all

I have a csv file ("SomeSiteValidURLs.csv") which listed all the links I need to scrape. The code is working and will go through the urls in the csv, scrape the information and record/save in another csv file ("Output.csv"). However, since I am planning to do it for a large portion of the site (for >10,000,000 pages), speed is important. For each link, it takes about 1s to crawl and save the info into the csv, which is too slow for the magnitude of the project. So I have incorporated the multithreading module and to my surprise it doesn't speed up at all, it still takes 1s person link. Did I do something wrong? Is there other way to speed up the processing speed?
Without multithreading:
import urllib2
import csv
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import threading
def crawlToCSV(FileName):
with open(FileName, "rb") as f:
for URLrecords in f:
OpenSomeSiteURL = urllib2.urlopen(URLrecords)
Soup_SomeSite = BeautifulSoup(OpenSomeSiteURL, "lxml")
OpenSomeSiteURL.close()
tbodyTags = Soup_SomeSite.find("tbody")
trTags = tbodyTags.find_all("tr", class_="result-item ")
placeHolder = []
for trTag in trTags:
tdTags = trTag.find("td", class_="result-value")
tdTags_string = tdTags.string
placeHolder.append(tdTags_string)
with open("Output.csv", "ab") as f:
writeFile = csv.writer(f)
writeFile.writerow(placeHolder)
crawltoCSV("SomeSiteValidURLs.csv")
With multithreading:
import urllib2
import csv
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import threading
def crawlToCSV(FileName):
with open(FileName, "rb") as f:
for URLrecords in f:
OpenSomeSiteURL = urllib2.urlopen(URLrecords)
Soup_SomeSite = BeautifulSoup(OpenSomeSiteURL, "lxml")
OpenSomeSiteURL.close()
tbodyTags = Soup_SomeSite.find("tbody")
trTags = tbodyTags.find_all("tr", class_="result-item ")
placeHolder = []
for trTag in trTags:
tdTags = trTag.find("td", class_="result-value")
tdTags_string = tdTags.string
placeHolder.append(tdTags_string)
with open("Output.csv", "ab") as f:
writeFile = csv.writer(f)
writeFile.writerow(placeHolder)
fileName = "SomeSiteValidURLs.csv"
if __name__ == "__main__":
t = threading.Thread(target=crawlToCSV, args=(fileName, ))
t.start()
t.join()
You're not parallelizing this properly. What you actually want to do is have the work being done inside your for loop happen concurrently across many workers. Right now you're moving all the work into one background thread, which does the whole thing synchronously. That's not going to improve performance at all (it will just slightly hurt it, actually).
Here's an example that uses a ThreadPool to parallelize the network operation and parsing. It's not safe to try to write to the csv file across many threads at once, so instead we return the data that would have been written back to the parent, and have the parent write all the results to the file at the end.
import urllib2
import csv
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool # This is a thread-based Pool
from multiprocessing import cpu_count
def crawlToCSV(URLrecord):
OpenSomeSiteURL = urllib2.urlopen(URLrecord)
Soup_SomeSite = BeautifulSoup(OpenSomeSiteURL, "lxml")
OpenSomeSiteURL.close()
tbodyTags = Soup_SomeSite.find("tbody")
trTags = tbodyTags.find_all("tr", class_="result-item ")
placeHolder = []
for trTag in trTags:
tdTags = trTag.find("td", class_="result-value")
tdTags_string = tdTags.string
placeHolder.append(tdTags_string)
return placeHolder
if __name__ == "__main__":
fileName = "SomeSiteValidURLs.csv"
pool = Pool(cpu_count() * 2) # Creates a Pool with cpu_count * 2 threads.
with open(fileName, "rb") as f:
results = pool.map(crawlToCSV, f) # results is a list of all the placeHolder lists returned from each call to crawlToCSV
with open("Output.csv", "ab") as f:
writeFile = csv.writer(f)
for result in results:
writeFile.writerow(result)
Note that in Python, threads only actually speed up I/O operations - because of the GIL, CPU-bound operations (like the parsing/searching BeautifulSoup is doing) can't actually be done in parallel via threads, because only one thread can do CPU-based operations at a time. So you still may not see the speed up you were hoping for with this approach. When you need to speed up CPU-bound operations in Python, you need to use multiple processes instead of threads. Luckily, you can easily see how this script performs with multiple processes instead of multiple threads; just change from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool to from multiprocessing import Pool. No other changes are required.
Edit:
If you need to scale this up to a file with 10,000,000 lines, you're going to need to adjust this code a bit - Pool.map converts the iterable you pass into it to a list prior to sending it off to your workers, which obviously isn't going to work very well with a 10,000,000 entry list; having that whole thing in memory is probably going to bog down your system. Same issue with storing all the results in a list. Instead, you should use Pool.imap:
imap(func, iterable[, chunksize])
A lazier version of map().
The chunksize argument is the same as the one used by the map()
method. For very long iterables using a large value for chunksize can
make the job complete much faster than using the default value of 1.
if __name__ == "__main__":
fileName = "SomeSiteValidURLs.csv"
FILE_LINES = 10000000
NUM_WORKERS = cpu_count() * 2
chunksize = FILE_LINES // NUM_WORKERS * 4 # Try to get a good chunksize. You're probably going to have to tweak this, though. Try smaller and lower values and see how performance changes.
pool = Pool(NUM_WORKERS)
with open(fileName, "rb") as f:
result_iter = pool.imap(crawlToCSV, f)
with open("Output.csv", "ab") as f:
writeFile = csv.writer(f)
for result in result_iter: # lazily iterate over results.
writeFile.writerow(result)
With imap, we never put the all of f into memory at once, nor do we store all the results in memory at once. The most we ever have in memory is chunksize lines of f, which should be more manageable.

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