While preparing for an upcoming presentation about Riak for the Columbus Ruby Brigade, I wrote a simple data loader. When I initially ran the load, it took about 4 minutes to load the data on the worst run. When you’re waiting to test your data load and write a presentation, 4 minutes is an eternity. Needless to say, I got frustrated pretty quickly with the speed of my data loader, so I hit up the Riak channel on IRC and started digging into the Ruby driver’s source code.
The Results
user system total real
defaults 63.660000 3.270000 66.930000 (166.475535)
dw => 1 50.940000 2.720000 53.660000 (128.470094)
dw => 0 52.350000 2.740000 55.090000 (120.151827)
n => 2 52.850000 2.790000 55.640000 (132.023310)
The Defaults
Our default load uses no customizations. Riak is going to write data to three nodes in the cluster (n = 3). Since we’re using the default configuration, we can safely assume that Riak will use quorum for write confirmation (w = n/2 + 1). Finally, we can also assume that the durable write value is to use a quorum, since that’s the default for riak-client.
Because we’re writing to n (3) nodes and we’re waiting for w (2) nodes to respond, writes were slower than I’d like. Thankfully, Riak makes it easy to tune how it will respond to writes.
Changing the N Value
The first change that we can do is change the N value (replication factor). The N value should have a huge improvement for my test machine – Riak is only on one of my hard drives. Even solid state drives can only write to one place at a time. When we create the bucket we can change the bucket’s properties and set the N value. note It’s important that you set bucket properties when you ‘create’ the bucket. Buckets are created when keys are added to them and they are deleted when the last key is deleted.
b1 = client.bucket('animals_dw1',
:keys => false)
b1.props = { :n_val => 1, :dw => 1 }
In this chunk of code we set the N value to 1 and set the durable writes to 1. This means that only 1 replica will have to commit the record to durable storage in order for the write to be considered a success.
On the bright side, this approach is considerably faster. Here’s the bummer: by setting the N value to 1, we’ve removed any hope of durability from our cluster – the data will never be replicated. Any server failure will result in data loss. For our testing purposes, it’s okay because we’re trying to see how fast we can make things, not how safe we can make them.
How much faster? Our run with all defaults enabled took 166 seconds. Only writing to 1 replica shaved 38 seconds off of our write time. The other thing that I changed was setting returnbody to false. By default, the Ruby Riak client will return the object that was saved. Turning this setting off should make things faster – less bytes are flying around the network.
Forget About Durability
What happens when we turn down durability? That’s the dw => 0 result in the table at the beginning of the article. We get an 8 second performance boost over our last load.
What did we change? We set both the dw and w parameters to 0. This means that our client has told Riak that we’re not going to wait for a response from any replicas before decided that a write has succeeded. This is a fire and forget write – we’re passing data as quickly as possible to the client and to hell with the consequences.
So, by eliminating any redundancy, ignoring the current record from the database, and refusing to acknowledge any reads from the server, we’re able to get a 46.3 second performance improvement over our default values. This is impressive, but it’s roughly akin to throwing our data at a bucket, not into the bucket.
What if I Care About My Data?
What if you care about your data? After all, we got our performance improvement from setting the number of replicas to 1 and turning off write acknowledgement. The fourth, and final run, that I performed took a look at what would happen if we kept the number of replicas at a quorum (an N value of 2) and ignored write responses. If we’re just streaming data into a database, we may not care if a record gets missed here and there. It turns out that this is only slightly slower than running with scissors. It takes 132 seconds to write the data; only 4 seconds slower than with durable writes set to 1 and still nearly 34.5 seconds faster than using the defaults.
The most recent version of this sample code can be found on github at https://github.com/peschkaj/riak_intro. Sample data was located through Infochimps.com. The data load uses the Taxobox data set.
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