Find Couchbase Owner of Expensive Query (CPU) - couchbase

We are having trouble with CPU spikes on our Couchbase cluster. Does anyone know of any good techniques to track down who/what is causing this?
The best I've got so far is polling admin/vitals and if CPU exceeds some threshold then dump out admin/active_requests. That will give us some indication of what is causing this.
Is there any way to find which user is associated with an expensive query?

Right now (Couchbase 4.6.0), the completed_requests/active_requests log doesn't show where the query originated, so there's no way to get that information normally. A silly, but feasible way to track that would be to add a dummy parameter to each query that would hold some identifying information, like application or user id.
E.g. SELECT * FROM bucket WHERE field="value" AND "myapp"="myapp"
or a parameterized query where the dummy parameter name identifies the source, and evaluates to true like so:
SELECT * FROM bucket WHERE field="value" AND $myapp and pass true into $myapp
Now you can find all the queries from a certain source in completed_requests, or figure out the source of an active query.

Related

Keeping mysql query results and variables set from the queries for use across pages and sessions

I have never used apc_store() before, and I'm also not sure about whether to free query results or not. So I have these questions...
In a MySQL Query Cache article here, it says "The MySQL query cache is a global one shared among the sessions. It caches the select query along with the result set, which enables the identical selects to execute faster as the data fetches from the in memory."
Does using free_result() after a select query negate the caching spoken of above?
Also, if I want to set variables and arrays obtained from the select query for use across pages, should I save the variables in memory via apc_store() for example? (I know that can save arrays too.) And if I do that, does it matter if I free the result of the query? Right now, I am setting these variables and arrays in an included file on most pages, since they are used often. This doesn't seem very efficient, which is why I'm looking for an alternative.
Thanks for any help/advice on the most efficient way to do the above.
MySQL's "Query cache" is internal to MySQL. You still have to perform the SELECT; the result may come back faster if the QC is enabled and usable in the situation.
I don't think the QC is what you are looking for.
The QC is going away in newer versions. Do not plan to use it.
In PHP, consider $_SESSION. I don't know whether it is better than apc_store for your use.
Note also, anything that is directly available in PHP constrains you to a single webserver. (This is fine for small to medium apps, but is not viable for very active apps.)
For scaling, consider storing a small key in a cookie, then looking up that key in a table in the database. This provides for storing arbitrary amounts of data in the database with only a few milliseconds of overhead. The "key" might be something as simple as a "user id" or "session number" or "cart number", etc.

Cosmos DB : Faster Search Options

We have huge cosmosDB container with billions of rows and almost 300 columns. Data is partitioned and modeled in a way we query it most of the time.
For example : User table is partitioned by userId thats why below query works fine.
Select * from User where userId = "user01234"
But in some cases, we need to query data differently that need sorting and then query.
For example : Get data from User Table using userpost and date of post
Select * from user where userPostId = "P01234" orderBy date limit 100
This query takes lot of time because of the size of data and data is not partitioned based on query2 (user Post).
My question is - How can we make query2 and other similar queries faster when data is not partitioned accordingly.
Option 1: "Create separate collection which is partitioned as per Query2" -
This will make query faster but for any new query we will end up creating a new collection, which is duplication of billions of records. [Costly Option]
Option 2: "Build elastic search on top of DB?" This is time consuming option and may be over killing for this slow query problem.
Is there any other option that can be used? Let me know your thoughts.
Thanks in advance!
Both options are expensive. The key is deciding which is cheaper, including running the cross-partition query. This will require you costing each of these options out.
For the cross-partition query, capture the RU charge in the response object so you know the cost of it.
For change feed, this will have an upfront cost as you run it over your existing collection, but whether that cost remains high depends on how much data is inserted or updated each month. Calculating the cost to populate your second collection will take some work. You can start by measuring the RU Charge in the response object when doing an insert then multiply by the number of rows. Calculating how much throughput you'll need will be a function of how quickly you want to populate your second collection. It's also a function of how much compute and how many instances you use to read and write the data to the second collection.
Once the second collection is populated, Change Feed will cost 2 RU/s to poll for changes (btw, this is configurable) and 1 RU/s to read each new item. The cost of inserting data into a second collection costs whatever it is when you measured it earlier.
If this second query doesn't get run that often and your data doesn't change that much, then change feed could save you money. If you run this query a lot and your data changes frequently too, change feed could still save you money.
With regards to Elastic Search or Azure Search, I generally find this can be more expensive than keeping the cross-partition query or change feed. Especially if you're doing it to just answer a second query. Generally this is a better option when you need true free text query capabilities.
A third option you might explore is using Azure Synapse Link and then run both queries using SQL Serverless or Spark.
Some other observations.
Unless you need all 300 properties in these queries you run, you may want to consider shredding these items into separate documents and storing as separate rows. Especially if you have highly asymmetric update patterns where only a small number of properties get frequently updated. This will save you a ton of money on updates because the smaller the item you update, the cheaper (and faster) it will be.
The other thing I would suggest is to look at your index policy and exclude every property that is not used in the where clause for your queries and include properties that are. This will have a dramatic impact on RU consumption for inserts. Also take a look at composite index for your date property as this has a dramatic impact on queries that use order by.

Elastic vs DB for regular search?

I have joined a new company where I observed the below use case.
Use case :- A table has around 500 GB of data. Data is user action events for each and every user activity. Purpose is to analyse the activity count
for different permutation and combination for any given date range. So data is further supplied to elastic(and lucene in different similar scenario use case).
My understanding is for this kind of scenario DB in itself should be sufficient.But When I try to query the DB for specific permutation and combination for given data range its damn slow and most of the time gets times out.
But when I to fetch same combination with elastic(or lucene), it is much faster. There is no full text search support required here.
Not sure what is causing the elastic(or lucene) to be much faster than SQL based DB even for regular(not full text) search ?
what can be the probable reason for the same ? I can think of two reasons here
Elastic(or lucene) keeps the data in compressed form. So may be it is quicker to search here ?
Elastic may help to achieve the parallelism with data kept in multiple shards by default. But in lucene case tI do not even see any parallelism.

Implementing a quota system to limit requests in a web based app

I want to limit my users to 25k/requests per hour/day/whatever.
My first idea was to simply use mysql and have a column in the users table where i would store the requests and i would increment this counter each time the user makes a request. Problem with this approach is that sometimes you end up writing at the same time in the column and you get a deadlock from mysql, so this isn't really a good way to go about it, is it ?
Another way would be, instead of incrementing the counters of a column, to insert log records in a separate table and then count these records for a given timespan, but this way you can easily end up with million records table and the query can be too slow.
When using a RDBMS another aspect to take into consideration is that at each request you'd have to count the user quota from database and this can take time depending on either of the above mentioned methods.
My second idea, i thought using something like redis/memcached (not sure of alternatives or which one of them is faster) and store the request counters there. This would be fast enough to query and increment the counters, for sure faster than a RDBMS, but i haven't tried it with huge amounts of data, so i am not sure how it will perform just yet.
My third idea, i would keep the quota data in memory in a map, something like map[int]int where the key would be the user_id and the value would be the quota usage and i'd protect the map access with a mutex. This would be the fastest solution of all but then what do you do if for some reason your app crashes, you lose all that data related to the number of requests certain user did. One way would be to catch the app when crashing and loop through the map and update the database. Is this feasible?
Not sure if either of the above is the right approach, but i am open to suggestions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "get a deadlock from mysql" when you try to update a row at the same time. But a simple update rate_limit set count = count + 1 where user_id = ? should do what you want.
Personally I have had great success with Redis for doing rate limiting. There are lots of resources out there to help you understand the appropriate approach for your use case. Here is one I just glanced at that seems to handle things correctly: https://www.binpress.com/tutorial/introduction-to-rate-limiting-with-redis/155. Using pipelines (MULTI) or Lua scripts may make things even nicer.
You can persist your map[int]int in RDBMS or just file system time to time and in defer function. You even can use it as cache instead of redis. Surely it will be anyway faster than connection to third-party service every request. Also you can store counters on user side simply in cookies. Smart user can clear cookies of-douse but is it so dangerous at all and you can also provide some identification info in cookies to make clearing uncomfortable.

Would using Redis with Rails provide any performance benefit for this specific kind of queries

I don't know if this is the right place to ask question like this, but here it goes:
I have an intranet-like Rails 3 application managing about 20k users which are in nested-set (preordered tree - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model).
Those users enter stats (data, just plain numeric values). Entered stats are assigned to category (we call it Pointer) and a week number.
Those data are further processed and computed to Results.
Some are computed from users activity + result from some other category... etc.
What user enters isn't always the same what he sees in reports.
Those computations can be very tricky, some categories have very specific formulae.
But the rest is just "give me sum of all entered values for this category for this user for this week/month/year".
Problem is that those stats needs also to be summed for a subset of users under selected user (so it will basically return sum of all values for all users under the user, including self).
This app is in production for 2 years and it is doing its job pretty well... but with more and more users it's also pretty slow when it comes to server-expensive reports, like "give me list of all users under myself and their statistics. One line for summed by their sub-group and one line for their personal stats"). Of course, users wants (and needs) their reports to be as actual as possible, 5 mins to reflect newly entered data is too much for them. And this specific report is their favorite :/
To stay realtime, we cannot do the high-intensive sqls directly... That would kill the server. So I'm computing them only once via background process and frontend just reads the results.
Those sqls are hard to optimize and I'm glad I've moved from this approach... (caching is not an option. See below.)
Current app goes like this:
frontend: when user enters new data, it is saved to simple mysql table, like [user_id, pointer_id, date, value] and there is also insert to the queue.
backend: then there is calc_daemon process, which every 5 seconds checks the queue for new "recompute requests". We pop the requests, determine what else needs to be recomputed along with it (pointers have dependencies... simplest case is: when you change week stats, we must recompute month and year stats...). It does this recomputation the easy way.. we select the data by customized per-pointer-different sqls generated by their classes.
those computed results are then written back to mysql, but to partitioned tables (one table per year). One line in this table is like [user_id, pointer_id, month_value, w1_value, w2_value, w3_value, w4_value]. This way, the tables have ~500k records (I've basically reduced 5x # of records).
when frontend needs those results it does simple sums on those partitioned data, with 2 joins (because of the nested set conds).
The problem is that those simple sqls with sums, group by and join-on-the-subtree can take like 200ms each... just for a few records.. and we need to run a lot of these sqls... I think they are optimized the best they can, according to explain... but they are just too hard for it.
So... The QUESTION:
Can I rewrite this to use Redis (or other fast key-value store) and see any benefit from it when I'm using Ruby and Rails? As I see it, if I'll rewrite it to use redis, I'll have to run much more queries against it than I have to with mysql, and then perform the sum in ruby manually... so the performance can be hurt considerably... I'm not really sure if I could write all the possible queries I have now with redis... Loading the users in rails and then doing something like "redis, give me sum for users 1,2,3,4,5..." doesn't seem like right idea... But maybe there is some feature in redis that could make this simpler?)...
Also the tree structure needs to be like nested set, i.e. it cannot have one entry in redis with list of all child-ids for some user (something like children_for_user_10: [1,2,3]) because the tree structure changes frequently... That's also the reason why I can't have those sums in those partitioned tables, because when the tree changes, I would have to recompute everything.. That's why I perform those sums realtime.)
Or would you suggest me to rewrite this app to different language (java?) and to compute the results in memory instead? :) (I've tried to do it SOA-way but it failed on that I end up one way or another with XXX megabytes of data in ruby... especially when generating the reports... and gc just kills it...) (and a side effect is that one generating report blocks the whole rails app :/ )
Suggestions are welcome.
Redis would be faster, it is an in-memory database, but can you fit all of that data in memory? Iterating over redis keys is not recommended, as noted in the comments, so I wouldn't use it to store the raw data. However, Redis is often used for storing the results of sums (e.g. logging counts of events), for example it has a fast INCR command.
I'm guessing that you would get sufficient speed improvement by using a stored procedure or a faster language than ruby (eg C-inline or Go) to do the recalculation. Are you doing group-by in the recalculation? Is it possible to change group-bys to code that orders the result-set and then manually checks when the 'group' changes. For example if you are looping by user and grouping by week inside the loop, change that to ordering by user and week and keep variables for the current and previous values of user and week, as well as variables for the sums.
This is assuming the bottleneck is the recalculation, you don't really mention which part is too slow.