Redis: Fail instead of evicting? - redis

Is there a way to set Redis so it will never evict data and cause a hard failure if it runs out of memory? I need to ensure no data is lost; I am not using this as a permanent data storage, mechanism, but rather for more of a temporary data storage mechanism for high volume/high performance data transformations.
Is there an alternative NoSQL data store that could come close in performance, but utilize disk read/write if memory runs out; this is not ideal, but is better than losing data. I am reading/writing/updating millions of JSON documents (12+ million and growing).

Yes.
First make sure that you set the maxmemory directive (in the conf file or with a CONFIG SET) to a value other than 0. This will instruct Redis to use that value as it's memory upper limit.
Next, set the maxmemory-policy directive to noeviction - this will cause Redis to return an OOM (out of memory) error when maxmemory is reached when trying to write to it.
See the config file in-file documentation for more details on these directives: http://download.redis.io/redis-stable/redis.conf

Related

For Ignite Persistence, how to control maximum data size on disk?

How can I limit maximum size on disk when using Ignite Persistence? For example, my data set in a database is 5TB. I want to cache maximum of 50GB of data in memory with no more than 500GB on disk. Any reasonable eviction policy like LRU for on-disk data will work for me. Parameter maxSize controls in-memory size and I will set it to 50GB. What should I do to limit my disk storage to 500GB then? Looking for something like maxPersistentSize and not finding it there.
Thank you
There is no direct parameter to limit the complete disk usage occupied by the data itself. As you mentioned in the question, you can control in-memory regon allocation, but when a data region is full, data pages are going to be flushed and loaded on demand to/from the disk, this process is called page replacement.
On the other hand, page eviction works only for non-persistent cluster preventing it from running OOM. Personally, I can't see how and why that eviction might be implemented for the data stored on disk. I'm almost sure that other "normal" DBs like Postgres or MySQL do not have this option either.
I suppose you might check the following options:
You can limit WAL and WAL archive max sizes. Though these items are rather utility ones, they still might occupy a lot of space [1]
Check if it's possible to use expiry policies on your data items, in this case, data will be cleared from disk as well [2]
Use monitoring metrics and configure alerting to be aware if you are close to the disk limits.

Redis using as disk persistance with RDB and AOF file

We are using redis server in production with 6 GB data size, Initially
we thought redis can be used as memory cache only, If it restarts then we can repopulate from the persistants data store with minimal downtime.
Now we realized that re-population of data from persistence store is not a good idea at all, It is causing major service downtime.
We want to evaluate redis persistant option by using RDB and AOF combination.We tried taking RDB snapshot once in a hour and committing to the AOF file with one second interval in test environments. AOF file is growing too big in test environment only. We tried to analyze the AOF file content and noticed that lot of keys we don't want to persist to the disk, We need them only in redis memory.
Is there any way to stop logging certain type of keys (block list keys) while logging to the AOF file
Generally, Redis does not provide a way to exclude certain types of keys from persistency. If you need some keys to persist to disk and others not to, you should use two independent Redis instances - one for each type and configure their persistency settings approriately. Divide and conquer.
Note: it is possible, however, to control what gets persisted in AOF inside the context if a Lua script - see the "Selective replication of commands" section of EVAL's documentation. That said, besides the consistency risks, it would be too much of a hassle to use this approach for what you need imo.

Redis concept: In memory or DB?

Based on the
http://redis.io/topics/faq
Redis is an in-memory but persistent on disk database.
So may I know redis save key/value in memory or in disk? or both?
When writing value in Redis, it write into memory and disk at the same time?
Thanks for the concept.
depending on how you configure it, redis can periodically back up the existing state to disk, but otherwise, everything is in memory.
Redis will atomically snapshot its memory state to disk if so configured. See this part of the docs for more info:
http://redis.io/topics/persistence
So you can have different levels of durability. For the most part, when you get a key, it is out of memory and when you set a key it is also in memory. The data is written to disk independently of read/write operations.

What if Redis keys are never deleted programmatically?

What will happen to my redis data if no expiry is set and no DEL command is used.
Will it be removed after some default time ?
One more,
How redis stores data, is it in any file format ? because I can access data even after restarting the computer. So which files are created by redis and where ?
Thanks.
Redis is a in-memory data store meaning all your data is kept in RAM (ie. volatile). So theoritically your data will live as long as you don't turn the power off.
However, it also provides persistence in two modes:
RDB mode which takes snapshots of your dataset and saves them to the disk in a file called dump.drb. This is the default mode.
AOF mode which records every write operation executed by the server in an Append-Only file and then replays it thus reconstructing the original data.
Redis persistence is very good explained here and here by the creator of Redis himself.

Is Redis a memory only store like memcached or does it write the data to the disk

Is Redis memory only store like memcached or does it write the data to the disk? If it does write to the disk, how often is the disk written to?
Redis persistence is described in detail here:
http://redis.io/topics/persistence
By default, redis performs snapshotting:
By default Redis saves snapshots of the dataset on disk, in a binary file called dump.rdb. You can configure Redis to have it save the dataset every N seconds if there are at least M changes in the dataset, or you can manually call the SAVE or BGSAVE commands.
For example, this configuration will make Redis automatically dump the dataset to disk every 60 seconds if at least 1000 keys changed: save 60 1000
Another good reference is this link to the author's blog where he tries to explain how redis persistance works:
http://antirez.com/post/redis-persistence-demystified.html
Redis holds all data in memory. If the size of an application's data is too large for that, then Redis is not an appropriate solution.
However, Redis also offers two ways to make the data persistent:
1) Snapshots at predefined intervals, which may also depend on the number of changes. Any changes between these intervals will be lost at a power failure or crash.
2) Writing a kind of change log at every data change. You can fine-tune how often this is physically written to the disk, but if you chose to always write immediately (which will cost you some performance), then there will be no data loss caused by the in-memory nature of Redis.