Hi all! *!!! If you are a big user of the Embedded RocksDB State Backend and have performance sensitive workloads, please read this !!!*
I want to quickly raise some awareness for a RocksDB version upgrade we plan to do, and some possible impact on application performance. *We plan to upgrade RocksDB to version 6.20.* That version of RocksDB unfortunately introduces some non-trivial performance regression. In our Nexmark Benchmark, at least one query is up to 13% slower. With some fixes, this can be improved, but even then there is an overall *regression up to 6% in some queries*. (See attached table for results from relevant Nexmark Benchmark queries). We would do this update nonetheless, because we need to get new features and bugfixes from RocksDB in. Please respond to this mail thread if you have major concerns about this. *### Fallback Plan* Optionally, we could fall back to Plan B, which is to upgrade RocksDB only to version 5.18.4. Which has no performance regression (after applying a custom patch). While this spares us the performance degradation of RocksDB 6.20.x, this has multiple disadvantages: - Does not include the better memory stability (strict cache control) - Misses out on some new features which some users asked about - Does not have the latest RocksDB bugfixes The latest point is especially bad in my opinion. While we can cherry-pick some bugfixes back (and have done this in the past), users typically run into an issue first and need to trace it back to RocksDB, then one of the committers can find the relevant patch from RocksDB master and backport it. That isn't the greatest user experience. Because of those disadvantages, we would prefer to do the upgrade to the newer RocksDB version despite the unfortunate performance regression. Best, Stephan
