Neo4j: Delete lots of nodes does not improve performance - performance

I have two graphs: one has 15k nodes and is a subgraph of the other which has 30k nodes. To receive the smaller one I took the bigger one and deleted some nodes and their relationships. Now I did some performance issues on both graphs and did the same queries on both and I was wondering that the performance in the bigger graph is better. I do not know the reason. Here I found that the deleted nodes are reserved for future when new nodes will be inserted but is this the true reason? I am using version 2.1.2.

If you deleted and inserted in one go, then your deleted records are still unused.
But at your small graph size this shouldn't matter, I think you have a different problem, please share all the code / queries that run slow as well as more information about your datamodel and graph.

Related

Fringe-detection algorithm for hierarchical structure

My back-end (Java) is heavily relying on Tree structures with strong inheritance. Conflict resolution is complex so I am looking to test way to simply block users when the propagation of changes in higher nodes has not yet reached the current element.
Hierarchies are represented through both Materialized Paths and Adjacency Lists for performance reasons. The goal would be to;
Prevent update (bad request) when API requests the change of a node with pending propagation
Inform user through the DTO (e.g. isLocked attribute) when they retrieve a node with pending propagation
Propagation is a simple matter of going through all nodes in a top-down fashion, previously level-by-level (which would have been easier) but now is no longer orchestrated: each node sends the message to its children.
At the moment I have two ideas I do not like:
Add a locked flag on each node (persisted in DB), toggle it to true for all descendants of a modified node, then each node can be unlocked after being processed.
Leverage the materialized path and record the current unprocessed node in a new table. If node D with path A.B.C.D is queried, any of the 4 path nodes in DB means the node has not been processed yet and should be locked.
I do not like approach 1 because it needs to update all entities twice, although retrieving the list would be quick with the Materialized Path.
I do not like approach 2 because:
The materialized path is stored as VARCHAR2, thus the comparison cannot be done in DB and I would first have to unwrap the path to get all nodes in the path and then query the DB to check for any of the elements in hierarchy.
Trees can be quite large with hundreds of children per node, tens of thousands of nodes per tree. Modifying the root would create a huge amount of those temporary records holding the current 'fringe' of the propagation. That many independent DB calls is not ideal, especially since nodes can often be processed in less than 10 ms. I'd probably quickly encounter a bottleneck and bad performances.
Is there another approach that could be taken to identify whether a propagation has reached a node? Examples, comparisons, ... Anything that could help decide on the best way to approach this problem.

How to determine the optimal capacity for Quadtree subdivision?

I've created a flocking simulation using Boid's algorithm and have integrated a quadtree for optimization. Boids are inserted into the quadtree if the quadtree has not yet met its boid capacity. If the quadtree has met its capacity, it will subdivide into smaller quadtrees and the remaining boids will try to insert again on that one, recursively.
The performance seems to get better if I increase the capacity from its default 4 to one that is capable of holding more boids like 20, and I was just wondering if there is any sort of rule or methodology that goes into picking the optimal capacity formulaically.
You can view the site live here or the source code here if relevant.
I'd assume it very much depends on your implementation, hardware, and the data characteristics.
Implementation:
An extreme case would be using GPU processing to compare entries. If you support that, having very large nodes, potentially just a single node containing all entries, may be faster than any other solution.
Hardware:
Cache size and Bus speed will play a big role, also depending on how much memory every node and every entry consumes. Accessing a sub-node that is not cached is obviously expensive, so you may want to increase the size of nodes in order to reduce sub-node traversal.
-> Coming back to implementation, storing the whole quadtree on a contiguous segment of memory can be very beneficial.
Data characteristics:
Clustered data: Having strongly clustered data can have adverse effect on performance because it may cause the tree to become very deep. In this case, increasing node size may help.
Large amounts of data will mean that you may get over a threshold very everything fits into a cache. In this case, making nodes larger will save memory because you will have fewer nodes and everything may fit into the cache again.
In my experience I found that 10-50 entries per node gives the best performance across different datasets.
If you update your tree a lot, you may want to define a threshold to avoid 'flickering' and frequent merging/splitting of nodes. I.e. split nodes with >25 entries but merge them only when getting less than 15 entries.
If you are interested in a quadtree-like structure that avoids degenerated 'deep' quadtrees, have a look at my PH-Tree. It is structured like a quadtree but operates on bit-level, so maximum depth is strictly limited to 64 or 32, depending on how many bits your data has. In practice the depth will rarely exceed 10 levels or so, even for very dense data. Note: A plain PH-Tree is a key-value 'map' in the sense that every coordinate (=key) can only have one entry (=value). That means you need to store lists or sets of entries in case you expect more than one entry for any given coordinate.

Can Circuit break exception be avoided using horizontal scaling?

I am using crate 1.0.2 which internally uses elasticsearch. So my question is applicable for both. For certain queries I get circuit break exception.
CircuitBreakingException: [parent] Data too large, data for [collect: 0] would be larger than limit of [11946544332/11.1gb]
These queries are mainly group by on multiple columns. I have billions of documents indexed and have 16 GB of RAM allocated as crate heap size. I have multiple such nodes connected together in a cluster. Will adding more nodes in the cluster help in getting rid of this error and will my same queries run fine ? Or is it that I must increase heap to 30 GB ? My worry is when I increase it to 30GB and as I add more data, someday that query will again hit the circuit breaker. So I wanted to solve it by scaling horizontally i.e. adding more nodes. Will that be wiser decision ?
Short answer: Usually horizontal scaling helps.
Your error seems to be caused by group by queries.
The GROUP BY operations are executed in a distributed fashion. So more nodes
will generally split the load and therefore also the memory usage. (Make sure
there are enough shards so that they're spread among all nodes)
There is a catch though: Eventually the data needs to be merged together on the
node you sent the initial query to. This is generally fine because the data
arrives pre-aggregated, but If the cardinality is too high (Ex. GROUP BY on a
primary key), the whole data set has to fit into memory on this coordinator
node.
If your nodes have enough memory to go up to 30 GB (with still having enough to
spare for the file system cache), I'd personally tend to increase the HEAP size
first, before adding new nodes.
Update:
Recent versions (2.1.X) also contain some fixes regarding the circuit-breaker behaviur. So if it's possible to update that'd be recommended as well.
Update2:
Note that there are different cases in which a circuit breaker can trip. In
your case it's caused by a GROUP BY using up quite a lot of memory. But it can
also be tripped if a single request is too large. For example if the bulk size
is too large. In such a case more nodes wouldn't help. You'd have to reduce the
bulk size.

Resource usage with rolling indices in Elasticsearch

My question is mostly based on the following article:
https://qbox.io/blog/optimizing-elasticsearch-how-many-shards-per-index
The article advises against having multiple shards per node for two reasons:
Each shard is essentially a Lucene index, it consumes file handles, memory, and CPU resources
Each search request will touch a copy of every shard in the index. Contention arises and performance decreases when the shards are competing for the same hardware resources
The article advocates the use of rolling indices for indices that see many writes and fewer reads.
Questions:
Do the problems of resource consumption by Lucene indices arise if the old indices are left open?
Do the problems of contention arise when searching over a large time range involving many indices and hence many shards?
How does searching many small indices compare to searching one large one?
I should mention that in our particular case, there is only one ES node though of course generally applicable answers will be more useful to SO readers.
It's very difficult to spit out general best practices and guidelines when it comes to cluster sizing as it depends on so many factors. If you ask five ES experts, you'll get ten different answers.
After several years of tinkering and fiddling around ES, I've found out that what works best for me is always to start small (one node, how many indices your app needs and one shard per index), load a representative data set (ideally your full data set) and load test to death. Your load testing scenarii should represent the real maximum load you're experiencing (or expecting) in your production environment during peak hours.
Increase the capacity of your cluster (add shard, add nodes, tune knobs, etc) until your load test pass and make sure to increase your capacity by a few more percent in order to allow for future growth. You don't want your production to be fine now, you want it to be fine in a year from now. Of course, it will depend on how fast your data will grow and it's very unlikely that you can predict with 100% certainty what will happen in a year from now. For that reason, as soon as my load test pass, if I expect a large exponential data growth, I usually increase the capacity by 50% more percent, knowing that I will have to revisit my cluster topology within a few month or a year.
So to answer your questions:
Yes, if old indices are left open, they will consume resources.
Yes, the more indices you search, the more resources you will need in order to go through every shard of every index. Be careful with aliases spanning many, many rolling indices (especially on a single node)
This is too broad to answer, as it again depends on the amount of data we're talking about and on what kind of query you're sending, whether it uses aggregation, sorting and/or scripting, etc
Do the problems of resource consumption by Lucene indices arise if the old indices are left open?
Yes.
Do the problems of contention arise when searching over a large time range involving many indices and hence many shards?
Yes.
How does searching many small indices compare to searching one large one?
When ES searches an index it will pick up one copy of each shard (be it replica or primary) and asks that copy to run the query on its own set of data. Searching a shard will use one thread from the search threadpool the node has (the threadpool is per node). One thread basically means one CPU core. If your node has 8 cores then at any given time the node can search concurrently 8 shards.
Imagine you have 100 shards on that node and your query will want to search all of them. ES will initiate the search and all 100 shards will compete for the 8 cores so some shards will have to wait some amount of time (microseconds, milliseconds etc) to get their share of those 8 cores. Having many shards means less documents on each and, thus, potentially a faster response time from each. But then the node that initiated the request needs to gather all the shards' responses and aggregate the final result. So, the response will be ready when the slowest shard finally responds with its set of results.
On the other hand, if you have a big index with very few shards, there is not so much contention for those CPU cores. But the shards having a lot of work to do individually, it can take more time to return back the individual result.
When choosing the number of shards many aspects need to be considered. But, for some rough guidelines yes, 30GB per shard is a good limit. But this won't work for everyone and for every use case and the article fails to mention that. If, for example, your index is using parent/child relationships those 30GB per shard might be too much and the response time of a single shard can be too slow.
You took this out of the context: "The article advises against having multiple shards per node". No, the article advises one to think about the aspects of structuring the indices shards before hand. One important step here is the testing one. Please, test your data before deciding how many shards you need.
You mentioned in the post "rolling indices", and I assume time-based indices. In this case, one question is about the retention period (for how long you need the data). Based on the answer to this question you can determine how many indices you'll have. Knowing how many indices you'll have gives you the total number of shards you'll have.
Also, with rolling indices, you need to take care of deleting the expired indices. Have a look at Curator for this.

Does relationship creation order effect query performance in Neo4j?

I'm using a batch inserter to create a database with about 1 billion nodes and 10 billion relationships. I've read in multiple places that it is preferable to sort the relationships in order min(from, to) (which I didn't do), but I haven't grasped why this practice is optimal. I originally thought this only aided insertion speed, but when I turned the database on, traversal was very slow. I realize there can be many reasons for that, especially with a database this size, but I want to be able to rule out the way I'm storing relationships.
Main question: does it kill traversal speed to insert relationships in a very "random" order because of where they will be stored on disk? I'm thinking that maybe when it tries to traverse nodes, the relationships are too fragmented. I hope someone can enlighten me about whether this would be the case.
UPDATES:
Use-case is pretty much the basic Neo4j friends of friends example using Cypher via the REST API for querying.
Each node (person) is unique and has a bunch of "knows" relationships for who they known. Although I have a billion nodes, all of the 10 billion relationships come from about 30 million of the nodes. So for any starting node I use in my query, it has an average of about 330 relationships coming from it.
In my initial tests, even getting 4 non-ordered friends of friends results was incredibly slow (100+ seconds on average). Of course, after the cache was warmed up for each query, it was fairly quick, but the graph is pretty random and I can't have the whole relationship store in memory.
Some of my system details, if that's needed:
- Neo4j 1.9.RC1
- Running on Linux server, 128gb of RAM, 8 core machine, non-SSD HD
I have not worked with Neo4J on such a large scale, but as far as i know this won't make much difference in the speed. Could you provide any links which state the order of insertion matters.
What matters in this case if the relations are cached or not. Until the cache is fairly populated, performance will be on the slower side. You should also set an appropriate cache size as soon as the index is created.
You should read this link on regarding neo4j performance.
Read the neo4j documentation on batch insert and these SO questions for help with bulk insert if you haven't already read them.

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