Memory usage keep growing while writing the Lucene.Net index - optimization

I open this discussion since googling about the Lucene.Net usage I have not found anything really useful.
The issue is simple: I am experiencing a problem in building and updating the Lucene.Net index. In particular its memory usage keeps growing while even if I fix the SetRAMBufferSizeMB to 256, SetMergeFactor to 100 and SetMaxMergeDocs to 100000. Moreover I use carefully the Close() and Commit() methods every time the index is used.
To make lucene.Net works for my data I started from this tutorial: http://www.lucenetutorial.com/lucene-in-5-minutes.html
It seems that for 10^5 and 10^6 documents 1.8GB of ram are necessary. Therefore, why have I to set SetRAMBufferSizeMB parameter if the actual RAM usage is 7 times more? Does anyone really know how to keep the memory usage bound?
Moreover, I observed that to deal with 10^5 or 10^6 documents it is necessary to compile Lucene.Net for an x64 platform. Indeed if I compile the code for an x86 platform the indexing crash systematically touching 1.2GB of RAM.
Does anyone is able to index the same amount of documents (or even more) using less RAM? In which hardware and software setting? My environment configuration is the following:
- os := win7 32/64 bits.
- sw := .Net framework 4.0
- hw := a 12 core Xeon workstation with 6GB of RAM.
- Lucene.Net rel.: 2.9.4g (current stable).
- Lucene.Net directory type: FSDirectory (the index is written into the disk).
OK, I tested the code using your advice on the re-usage of Document/Fields instances however the code performs exactly the same in terms of memory usage.
Here I post few debugging lines for some parameters I have tracked during the indexing process of 1000000 documents.
DEBUG - BuildIndex – IndexWriter - RamSizeInBytes 424960B; index process dimension 1164328960B. 4% of the indexing process.
DEBUG - BuildIndex – IndexWriter - RamSizeInBytes 457728B; index process dimension 1282666496B. 5% of the indexing process.
DEBUG - BuildIndex – IndexWriter - RamSizeInBytes 457728B; index process dimension 1477861376B. 6% of the indexing process.
The index process dimension is obtained as follows:
It is easy to observe how fast the process grows in RAM (~1.5GB at the 6% of the indexing process) even if the RAM buffer exploited by the IndexWriter is more or less unchanged. Therefore, the question is: is it possible to explicitly limit the RAM usage of the indexing process size? I do not care if the performances drop down during the searching phase and if I have to wait for a while for a complete index, but I need to be sure that the indexing process does not hit an OOM or a stack overflow error indexing a large number of documents. How can I do that if it is impossible to limit the memory usage?
For completeness, I post the code used for the debugging:
// get the current process
Process currentProcess = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess();
// get the physical mem usage of the index writer
long totalBytesOfIndex = writer.RamSizeInBytes();
// get the physical mem usage
long totalBytesOfMemoryUsed = currentProcess.WorkingSet64;

Finally, I found the bug. it is contained into the ItalianAnalyzer (the analiser for the Italian Language) which has been built exploiting the Luca Gentili contribution (http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/italian/stemmer.html). Indeed inside the ItalianAnalyzer class a file containing the stop words was open several times and after each usage it was not closed. This was the reason of the OOM problem for me.
Solving this bug Lucene.Net is light-speed both to build the index and search.

The SetRAMBufferSizeMB is just one of the way to determine when to flush the IndexWriter to disk. It will flush segments data when XXX MB are writen to memory and ready to be flushed to disk.
There are lots of other objects in Lucene that will also use memory, and have nothing to do with the RamBuffer.
Usually, the first thing to try when you run OOM while indexing is to re-use Document/Fields instances. If you multithread indexation, make sure you only reuse them on the same thread. It happened to me to run OOM because of that, when the underlying IO is blazing fast and the .NET garbage collector just cant keep up with all the small objects created.

Related

Configuring Lucene Index writer, controlling the segment formation (setRAMBufferSizeMB)

How to set the parameter - setRAMBufferSizeMB? Is depending on the RAM size of the Machine? Or Size of Data that needs to be Indexed? Or any other parameter? could someone please suggest an approach for deciding the value of setRAMBufferSizeMB.
So, what we have about this parameter in Lucene javadoc:
Determines the amount of RAM that may be used for buffering added
documents and deletions before they are flushed to the Directory.
Generally for faster indexing performance it's best to flush by RAM
usage instead of document count and use as large a RAM buffer as you
can. When this is set, the writer will flush whenever buffered
documents and deletions use this much RAM.
The maximum RAM limit is inherently determined by the JVMs available
memory. Yet, an IndexWriter session can consume a significantly larger
amount of memory than the given RAM limit since this limit is just an
indicator when to flush memory resident documents to the Directory.
Flushes are likely happen concurrently while other threads adding
documents to the writer. For application stability the available
memory in the JVM should be significantly larger than the RAM buffer
used for indexing.
By default, Lucene uses 16 Mb as this parameter (this is the indication to me, that you shouldn't have that much big parameter to have fine indexing speed). I would recommend you to tune this parameter by setting it let's say to 500 Mb and checking how well your system behave. If you will have crashes, you could try some smaller value like 200 Mb, etc. until your system will be stable.
Yes, as it stated in the javadoc, this parameter depends on the JVM heap, but for Python, I think it could allocate memory without any limit.

How to properly assign huge heap space for JVM

Im trying to work around an issue which has been bugging me for a while. In a nutshell: on which basis should one assign a max heap space for resource-hogging application and is there a downside for tit being too large?
I have an application used to visualize huge medical datas, which can eat up to several gigabytes of memory if several imaging volumes are opened size by side. Caching the data to be viewed is essential for fluent workflow. The software is supported with windows workstations and is started with a bootloader, which assigns the heap size and launches the main application. The actual memory needed by main application is directly proportional to the data being viewed and cannot be determined by the bootloader, because it would require reading the data, which would, ultimately, consume too much time.
So, to ensure that the JVM has enough memory during launch we set up xmx as large as we dare based, by current design, on the max physical memory of the workstation. However, is there any downside to this? I've read (from a post from 2008) that it is possible for native processes to hog up excess heap space, which can lead to memory errors during runtime. Should I maybe also sniff for free virtualmemory or paging file size prior to assigning heap space? How would you deal with this situation?
Oh, and this is my first post to these forums. Nice to meet you all and be gentle! :)
Update:
Thanks for all the answers. I'm not sure if I put my words right, but my problem rose from the fact that I have zero knowledge of the hardware this software will be run on but would, nevertheless, like to assign as much heap space for the software as possible.
I came to a solution of assigning a heap of 70% of physical memory IF there is sufficient amount of virtual memory available - less otherwise.
You can have heap sizes of around 28 GB with little impact on performance esp if you have large objects. (lots of small objects can impact GC pause times)
Heap sizes of 100 GB are possible but have down sides, mostly because they can have high pause times. If you use Azul Zing, it can handle much larger heap sizes significantly more gracefully.
The main limitation is the size of your memory. If you heap exceeds that, your application and your computer will run very slower/be unusable.
A standard way around these issues with mapping software (which has to be able to map the whole world for example) is it break your images into tiles. This way you only display the image which is one the screen (or portions which are on the screen) If you need to be able to zoom in and out you might need to store data at two to four levels of scale. Using this approach you can view a map of the whole world on your phone.
Best to not set JVM max memory to greater than 60-70% of workstation memory, in some cases even lower, for two main reasons. First, what the JVM consumes on the physical machine can be 20% or more greater than heap, due to GC mechanics. Second, the representation of a particular data entity in the JVM heap may not be the only physical copy of that entity in the machine's RAM, as the OS has caches and buffers and so forth around the various IO devices from which it grabs these objects.

How can I change maximum available heap size for a task in FreeRTOS?

I'm creating a list of elements inside a task in the following way:
l = (dllist*)pvPortMalloc(sizeof(dllist));
dllist is 32 byte big.
My embedded system has 60kB SRAM so I expected my 200 element list can be handled easily by the system. I found out that after allocating space for 8 elements the system is crashing on the 9th malloc function call (256byte+).
If possible, where can I change the heap size inside freeRTOS?
Can I somehow request the current status of heap size?
I couldn't find this information in the documentation so I hope somebody can provide some insight in this matter.
Thanks in advance!
(Yes - FreeRTOS pvPortMalloc() returns void*.)
If you have 60K of SRAM, and configTOTAL_HEAP_SIZE is large, then it is unlikely you are going to run out of heap after allocating 256 bytes unless you had hardly any heap remaining before hand. Many FreeRTOS demos will just keep creating objects until all the heap is used, so if your application is based on one of those, then you would be low on heap before your code executed. You may have also done something like use up loads of heap space by creating tasks with huge stacks.
heap_4 and heap_5 will combine adjacent blocks, which will minimise fragmentation as far as practical, but I don't think that will be your problem - especially as you don't mention freeing anything anywhere.
Unless you are using heap_3.c (which just makes the standard C library malloc and free thread safe) you can call xPortGetFreeHeapSize() to see how much free heap you have. You may also have xPortGetMinimumEverFreeHeapSize() available to query how close you have ever come to running out of heap. More information: http://www.freertos.org/a00111.html
You could also define a malloc() failed hook (http://www.freertos.org/a00016.html) to get instant notification of pvPortMalloc() returning NULL.
For the standard allocators you will find a config option in FreeRTOSConfig.h .
However:
It is very well possible you run out of memory already, depending on the allocator used. IIRC there is one that does not free() any blocks (free() is just a dummy). So any block returned will be lost. This is still useful if you only allocate memory e.g. at startup, but then work with what you've got.
Other allocators might just not merge adjacent blocks once returned, increasing fragmentation much faster than a full-grown allocator.
Also, you might loose memory to fragmentation. Depending on your alloc/free pattern, you quickly might end up with a heap looking like swiss cheese: Many holes between allocated blocks. So while there is still enough free memory, no single block is big enough for the size required.
If you only allocate blocks that size there, you might be better of using your own allocator or a pool (blocks of fixed size). Thaqt would be statically allocated (e.g. array) and chained as a linked list during startup. Alloc/free would then just be push/pop on a stack (or put/get on a queue). That would also be very fast and have complexity O(1) (interrupt-safe if properly written).
Note that normal malloc()/free() are not interrupt-safe.
Finally: Do not cast void *. (Well, that's actually what standard malloc() returns and I expect that FreeRTOS-variant does the same).

mongodb high cpu usage

I have installed MongoDB 2.4.4 on Amazon EC2 with ubuntu 64 bit OS and 1.6 GB RAM.
On this server, only MongoDB running nothing else.
But sometime CPU usage reach to 99% and load average: 500.01, 400.73,
620.77
I have also installed MMS on server to monitor what's going on server.
Here is MMS detail
As per MMS details, indexing working perfectly for each queries.
Suspect details as below
1) HIGH non-mapped virtual memory
2) HIGH page faults
Can anyone help me to understand what exactly causing high CPU usage ?
EDIT:
After comments of #Dylan Tong, i have reduced active connetions but
still there is high non-mapped virtual memory
Here's a summary of a few things to look into:
1. Observed a large number of connections and cursors (13k):
- fix: make sure your connection pool is appropriate. For reporting, and your current request rate, you only need a few connections at most. Also, I'm guessing you have a m1small instance, which means you only have 1 core.
2. Review queries and indexes:
- run your queries with explain(), to observe how the queries are executed. The right model normally results in queries only pulling very few documents and utilization of an index.
3. Memory (compact and readahead setting):
- make the best use of memory. 1.6GB is low. Check how much free memory you have, and compare it to what is reported as resident. A couple of common causes of low resident memory is due to fragmentation. If there are alot of documents moving, changing size and such, you should run the compact command to defragment your data files. Also, a bad readahead can lead to poor use of memory as well. Check your readahead setting (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man2/readahead.2.html). Try a few values starting with low values (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/administration/production-notes/). The production notes recommend 32 (for standard 512byte blocks). Sometimes higher values are optimal if your documents are larger. The hope is that resident memory should be close to your available memory and your page faults should start to lower.
If you're using resources to the fullest after this, and you're still capped out on CPU then it means you need to up your resources.

Heap profiling on ARM

I am developing a GUI-heavy C++ application on a Freescale MX51-based board Linux 2.6.35. I would like to perform heap profiling.
Unfortunately, all heap profiling tools I have found have either been too intrusive or ostensibly non-working on ARM. Specific tools I've tried:
Valgrind Massif: unworkable on my platform due to the platform's feeble CPU. The 80% CPU time overhead introduced by Massif causes a range of problems in my application that cannot be compensated for.
gperftools (formerly Google Performance Tools) tcmalloc: All features of this rather un-intrusive, library-based libc malloc() replacement work on my target except for the heap profiler. To rephrase, the thread caching allocator works but the profiler does not. I'll explain the failure mode of the profiler below for anyone curious.
Can anyone suggest a set of replacement tools for performing C++ heap profiling on ARM platforms? Ideal output would ultimately be a directed allocation graph, similar to what gperftools' tcmalloc outputs. Low resource utilization is a must- my platform is highly resource constrained.
Failure mode of gperftools' tcmalloc explained:
I'm providing this information only for those that are curious; I do not expect a response. I'm seeing something similar to gperftools' issue #407 below, except on ARM rather than x86.
Specifically, I always get the message "Hooked allocator frame not found, returning empty trace." I spent some time debugging the issue and it appears that, when dynamically linking the tcmalloc library, frame pointers at the boundary between my application and the dynamic library are null- the stack cannot be walked "above" the call into the dynamic library.
gperftools issue #407: https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools/issues/410
stackoverflow user seeing similar problems on ARM: Missing frames on shared libraries on ARM
Heaps. Many ways to do them, but I've only run across 3 main types that matter in embedded land:
Linked list heaps. Each alloc is tracked in a "used" list. Once freed, they are dropped into a "free" list. On freeing, adjacent blocks of free memory are "joined" into larger pieces. Allocs can be any size. Each alloc and free is a O(N) op as it has to traverse the free list to give you a piece of memory plus break the free block into a size close to what you asked for while leaving the remaining block in the free list. Because of the increasing overhead per alloc, this system cannot be used by itself on smaller systems. This also tends to cause memory fragmentation over time if steps aren't taken to minimize it.
Fixed size (unit) heaps. You break your heap into equal size (smaller) parts. This wastes memory a bit, depending on how big the chunks are (and how many different sized, fixed allocator heaps you create), but alloc and free are both O(1) time operations. No searching, no joining. This style is often combined with the first one for "small object allocations" as the engines I've worked with have 95% of their allocations below a set size (say 256 bytes). This way, you use the unit heap for small allocs for huge speed and only minimal memory loss, while using the list heap for larger allocs. No external fragmentation of memory either.
Relocatable memory heaps. You don't give out pointers to memory, but handles. That way, behind the scenes, you can change memory pointers when needed to remove fragmentation or whatever. High overhead. High pain the the #$$ quotient as it's easy to abuse and get dangling pointer all over. Also added overhead for each memory dereference. But wanted to mention it.
There's some basic patterns. You can find all sorts of libs out in the wild that use them and also have built in statistics for number of allocs, fragmentation, and other useful stats. It's also not the hard to roll your own really, though I'd not recommend it for anything outside of satisfying curiosity as debugging without a working malloc is painful indeed. Adding thread support is pretty straightforward as well, but again, downloading a ready made solution is the better choice.
The above info applies to all platforms, ARM or otherwise, though most of my experience has been on low level ARM stuff so the above info is battle tested for your platform. Hope this helps!