I am creating a distribution server with separate drives. One of the drives is going to be for the SNAPSHOT folder. All my other SQL DATA Drives have 64k block Allocation sizes.
Should the SNAPSHOT drive also have 64K block Allocation size? I am thinking it does not matter for the SNAPSHOT, but this will be the first time that I am building a distribution server and I could not find a recommendation for it.
I have configured replication many times and never bothered about ,changing block size of drive,snapshot is stored..
I also don't see any mention in best practice's section for snapshot mentioning block size,so i would recommend go with defaults
Related
I have a Synology with 2 To of disk space, and it is saved every day by Hyper Backup (with Smart Recycle).
But there is a file #img_bkp_cache that is growing, and takes almost 1/5th of the total disk capacity :
368G /volume2/#img_bkp_cache
1.3T /volume2/Samba
Is it safe to remove that cache file? How to do that? What can I do to shrink it otherwise?
Thank you for your help.
Here is Synology support answer (translated):
The cache image contains your remote backups index. This index is
compared to the remote index to figure out which elements have
changed. If you have several remote backups, then #img_bkp_cache will
get bigger and bigger.
The index takes roughly 5% of the total size of a backup.
It is not really safe to remove #img_bkp_cache. If you do so, the
remote backup will not be affected, but it will be impossible to manage
incremental backups.
In a nutshell, this file is important and cannot be deleted without consequences.
Note: Finally, I switched from RAID 1 to RAID 5 and doubled my storage capacity (I had a fifth volume that was unused), which "solved" the problem.
We recently migrated to Couchbase 3.1.0. The odd thing is - when performing full backup of a bucket, web UI alerts "Hard Out Of Memory Error. Bucket X on node Y is full. All memory allocated to this bucket is used for metadata". The numbers from RAM usage in the web UI contradict that - about 75% is used, but not 100%. I looked into the logs, but haven't find any similar errors there.
Is that even normal?
This is a known issue in the Couchbase Server 3.x releases.
To understand the problem, we must also first understand Database Change Protocol (DCP), the protocol used to transfer data throughout the system. At a high level the flow-control for DCP is as follows:
The Consumer creates a connection with the Producer and sends an Open Connection message. The Consumer then sends a Control message to indicate per stream flow control. This messages will contain “stream_buffer_size” in the key section and the buffer size the Consumer would like each stream to have in the value section.
The Consumer will then start opening streams so that is can receive data from the server.
The Producer will then continue to send data for the stream that has buffer space available until it reaches the maximum send size.
Steps 1-3 continue until the connection is closed, as the Consumer continues to consume items from the stream.
The cbbackup utility does not implement any flow control (data buffer limits) however, and it will try to stream all vbuckets from all nodes at once, with no cap on the buffer size.
While this does not mean that it will use the same amount of memory as your overall data size (as the streams are being drained slowly by the cbbackup process), it does mean that a large memory overhead is required to be able to store the data streams.
When you are in a heavy DGM (disk greater than memory) scenario, the amount of memory required to store the streams is likely to grow more rapidly than cbbackup can drain them as it is streaming large quantities of data off of disk, leading to very large streams, which take up a lot of memory as previously mentioned.
The slightly misleading message about metadata taking up all of the memory is displayed as there is no memory left for the data, so all of the remaining memory is allocated to the metadata, which when using value eviction cannot be ejected from memory.
The reason that this only affects Couchbase Server versions prior to 4.0 is that in 4.0 a server-side improvement to DCP stream management was made that allows the pausing of DCP streams to keep the memory footprint down, this is tracked as MB-12179.
As a result, you should not experience the same issue on Couchbase Server versions 4.x+, regardless of how DGM your bucket is.
Workaround
If you find yourself in a situation where this issue is occurring, then terminating the backup job should release all of the memory consumed by the streams immediately.
Unfortunately if you have already had most of your data evicted from memory as a result of the backup, then you will have to retrieve a large quantity of data off of disk instead of RAM for a small period of time, which is likely to increase your get latencies.
Over time 'hot' data will be brought into memory when requested, so this will only be a problem for a small period of time, however this is still a fairly undesirable situation to be in.
The workaround to avoid this issue completely is to only stream a small number of vbuckets at once when performing the backup, as opposed to all vbuckets which cbbackup does by default.
This can be achieved using cbbackupwrapper which comes bundled with all Couchbase Server releases 3.1.0 and later, details of using cbbackupwrapper can be found in the Couchbase Server documentation.
In particular the parameter to pay attention to is the -n flag, which specifies the number of vbuckets to be backed up in a batch at once.
As the name suggests, cbbackupwrapper is simply a wrapper script on top of cbbackup which partitions the vbuckets up and automatically handles all of the directory creation and backup generation, while still using cbbackup under the hood.
As an example, with a batch size of 50, cbbackupwrapper would backup vbuckets 0-49 first, followed by 50-99, then 100-149 etc.
It is suggested that you test with cbbackupwrapper in a testing environment which mirrors your production environment to find a suitable value for -n and -P (which controls how many backup processes run at once, the combination of these two controls the amount of memory pressure caused by backup as well as the overall speed).
You should not find that lowering the value of -n from its default 100 decreases the backup speed, in some cases you may find that the backup speed actually increases due to the fact that there is far less memory pressure on the server.
You may however wish to sensibly adjust the -P parameter if you wish to speed up the backup further.
Below is an example command:
cbbackupwrapper http://[host]:8091 [backup_dir] -u [user_name] -p [password] -n 50
It should be noted that if you use cbbackupwrapper to perform your backup then you must also use cbrestorewrapper to restore the data, as cbrestorewrapper is automatically aware of the directory structures used by cbbackupwrapper.
When you run a full backup, by default the backup tool streams data from all nodes over the network. This is not the best way, because it causes a lot of extra load and increased memory usage, especially of you run cbbackup on one of the Couchbase nodes. I would use the data-copy mode of cbbackup, which copies data directly from the files on disk:
> sudo /opt/couchbase/bin/cbbackup couchstore-files:///opt/couchbase/var/lib/couchbase/data/ /tmp/backup
Of course, change the data path to wherever your Couchbase data is actually stored. (In my example it runs as sudo because only root has read access to /opt/couchbase/blabla..) Do this on every node, then collect all the backup folders and put them somewhere. Note that the backups are very compressible, so you might want to zip them before copying over the network.
The reason I ask it we have a dedicated RAID10 array with ~150GB for the tempdb (the "t" drive). It is only used for storing tempdb. The t drive isn't used by by SQL Server or any other process for anything else.
Our DBA has tempdb setup with 15GB initial size and autogrow 20% increments. Everytime the server starts it resized to 15GB and then over the course of the day grows to ~80GB (on average). Now IT is looking into making initial size larger say 30 or 40GB but given the drive is ONLY used for tempdb my thinking is why not "max it" right away.
Is the any negative effect to simply create 4 data files in the primary group for tempdb give them each an initial size of 30GB (120GB total), turn autogrow off and be done with it?
Are there any limits on SQL Server ability to span multiple tempdb data files in one query? i.e. will it cause problems if the tempdb has say 70GB total free but the file used by one process is full (30 of 30GB used)?
I would size them to about 100GB and leave autogrow on, this way you don't have to wait for it to grow every time, I would also add multiple files
Is the any negative effect to simply
create 4 data files in the primary
group for tempdb give them each an
initial size of 30GB, turn autogrow
off and be done with it?
Sounds like a good plan to me, however I would leave autogrow on just in case someone decides to do a sort operation on a big table which doesn't have an index on that column
See also here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966534.aspx
It is recommended to have .25 to 1
data files (per filegroup) for each
CPU on the host server.
This is especially true for TEMPDB
where the recommendation is 1 data
file per CPU.
Dual core counts as 2 CPUs; logical
procs (hyperthreading) do not.
We have found it very useful to create large TempDB data and log files. Any actions that limit server OS activities such as resizing TempDB increase server efficiencies. We have a 16 processor machine with 113 GB dedicated to TempDB data space. This machine is dedicated to large SSIS ETL processes, thus resulting in mass data operations.
The bulk of our ETL operations spawn up to 4 SQL threads. After initially configuring a TempDB file for each processor (16), we quickly realized via performance monitoring that our configuration was forcing SQL\windows to unnecessarily span the multiple TempDB files. We settled on 5 larger TempDB data files and realized performance improvements. We have since moved on to a 24 processor box and are using 8 TempDB files.
Please note that this is a large data migration server; I’m sure transaction-oriented systems would still benefit from the recommended 1-1 processor to TempDB file configuration. It should also be noted that having a large increase % on a TempDB file may force a critical transaction to take the windows operation hit and thus may not be appropriate for your specific application.
So I have a database that is acting weird. I am watching all activity on the server, and the tempdb is constantly growing. It has grown by 30gb in about 45 minutes. I keep checking the allocated space in the tempdb, and it is always about 8mb. I know that it is not needing all the space it is allocating, I have watched 1 transaction happening with the tempdb essentially empty and it still growing.
It appears to me that the engine instead of using previously allocated space is instead choosing to use more of the hard drive space.
I noticed our tempdb was extremely large earlier today and restarted SQL, that brought the tempdb down in size to a good size, but it has been growing again ever since, and constantly restarting SQL is not an option as this is a production environment. I have limited hd space on this server so I need to keep the tempdb at a reasonable size.
Have you done an analysis on the scripts that are running? Have you used the profiler to determine SQL activity?
My first thoughts are scripts using temp tables (#table) and a possible Cartesian Product join?
As a note the tempdb is recreated on startup of SQL server so thats why it will be truncated when you restart the service.
I have had a few problems with log files growing too big on my SQL Servers (2000). Microsoft doesn't recommend using auto shrink for log files, but since it is a feature it must be useful in some scenarios. Does anyone know when is proper to use the auto shrink property?
Your problem is not that you need to autoshrink periodically but that you need to backup the log files periodically. (We back ours up every 15 minutes.) Backing up the database itself is not sufficient, you must do the log as well. If you do not back up the transaction log, it will grow until it takes up all the space on the drive. If you back it up, it frees the space to be reused (you will still probably need to shrink after the first backup to get the log down to a more reasonable size). If you don't need to be able torecover from transactions (which you should need to be able to do unless your entire database consists of tables that are loaded from another source and can easily be re-loaded.), then set your log to simlpe recovery mode.
One reason why autoshrinking isn't so good an idea is that you will be growing the transaction log frequently which slows down performance. IF you back up the log, one you get to a relatively stable size (the amount of space normally used by the transaction log in the time period between backups), then the log will only need to grow occasionally if there are an unusually heavy amount fo transactions.
My take on this is that auto-shrink is useful when you have many fairly small databases that frequently get larger due to added data, and then have a lot of empty space afterwards. You also need to not mind that the files will be fragmented on the disk when they frequently grow and shrink. I'd never use auto-shrink on a critical database or one larger than 2 GB, as you never know when the shrink operation will kick in, and access to the database will be blocked until the shrink has completed.
You should never have autoshrink turned on. It causes performance degradation in several ways. The file-system and indexes become fragmented and it is very resource intensive. It is also not necessary if you manage your backups correctly.
Read this answer from Paul Randal on Server Fault and Just Say No To Auto-Shrink!!
I used to use it when we had a demo version of a huge database that took up a lot of space on the laptop, so we used it to keep the size down.
The key is to use it only when the data is basically throw away.
You should truncate the logs periodically as a part of your backup strategy.