Re: Soliciting thoughts on possible read optimization

2010-08-11 Thread Ryan King
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Arya Asemanfar aryaaseman...@gmail.com wrote:
 I mentioned this today to a couple folks at Cassandra Summit, and thought
 I'd solicit some more thoughts here.
 Currently, the read stage includes checking row cache. So if your concurrent
 reads is N and you have N reads reading from disk, the next read will block
 until a disk read finishes, even if it's in row cache. Would it make sense
 to isolate disk reads from cache reads? To either make the read stage be
 only used on misses, or to make 2 read stages CacheRead and DiskRead? Of
 course, we'd have to go to DiskRead for mmap since we wouldn't know until we
 asked the OS.
 My thought is that stages should be based on resources rather than
 semantics, but that may be wrong. Logically, I don't think it would make
 sense to have the read stage bounded in a hypothetical system where there is
 no IO; it's most likely because of the disk and subsequent IO contention
 that that cap was introduced.
 As a possible bonus with this change, you can make other optimizations like
 batching row reads from disk where the keys were in key cache (does this
 even make sense? I'm not too sure how that would work).

I think this is a reasonable analysis. The idea of stages in the
research SEDA is to put bounds around scarce resources. I wouldn't
call reading from the row cache a scarce resource. I'd expect this
change to have significant performance improvements for workloads that
are heavily rowcache-able.

-ryan


Re: Soliciting thoughts on possible read optimization

2010-08-11 Thread Jonathan Ellis
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-1379

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Arya Asemanfar aryaaseman...@gmail.com wrote:
 I mentioned this today to a couple folks at Cassandra Summit, and thought
 I'd solicit some more thoughts here.
 Currently, the read stage includes checking row cache. So if your concurrent
 reads is N and you have N reads reading from disk, the next read will block
 until a disk read finishes, even if it's in row cache. Would it make sense
 to isolate disk reads from cache reads? To either make the read stage be
 only used on misses, or to make 2 read stages CacheRead and DiskRead? Of
 course, we'd have to go to DiskRead for mmap since we wouldn't know until we
 asked the OS.
 My thought is that stages should be based on resources rather than
 semantics, but that may be wrong. Logically, I don't think it would make
 sense to have the read stage bounded in a hypothetical system where there is
 no IO; it's most likely because of the disk and subsequent IO contention
 that that cap was introduced.
 As a possible bonus with this change, you can make other optimizations like
 batching row reads from disk where the keys were in key cache (does this
 even make sense? I'm not too sure how that would work).
 Let me know what you guys think.
 Thanks,
 Arya



-- 
Jonathan Ellis
Project Chair, Apache Cassandra
co-founder of Riptano, the source for professional Cassandra support
http://riptano.com


Soliciting thoughts on possible read optimization

2010-08-10 Thread Arya Asemanfar
I mentioned this today to a couple folks at Cassandra Summit, and thought
I'd solicit some more thoughts here.

Currently, the read stage includes checking row cache. So if your concurrent
reads is N and you have N reads reading from disk, the next read will block
until a disk read finishes, even if it's in row cache. Would it make sense
to isolate disk reads from cache reads? To either make the read stage be
only used on misses, or to make 2 read stages CacheRead and DiskRead? Of
course, we'd have to go to DiskRead for mmap since we wouldn't know until we
asked the OS.

My thought is that stages should be based on resources rather than
semantics, but that may be wrong. Logically, I don't think it would make
sense to have the read stage bounded in a hypothetical system where there is
no IO; it's most likely because of the disk and subsequent IO contention
that that cap was introduced.

As a possible bonus with this change, you can make other optimizations like
batching row reads from disk where the keys were in key cache (does this
even make sense? I'm not too sure how that would work).

Let me know what you guys think.

Thanks,
Arya