Neo4j query monitoring / profiling for long running queries - neo4j

Question

I have some relly long running queries. Just as abckground information: I am crawling my graph for all instances of a specific meta path. for example, count all instances of a specific metha path found in the graph.
MATCH (a:Content) - [:isTaggedWith]-> (t:Term) <-[:isTaggedWith]-(b:Content) return (*)
In the first place, I want to measure the runtimes. is there any possibility to do so? especially in the community edition?
Furthermore, I have the problem that I do not know, whether a query is still running in neo4j or if it was already terminated. I issue the query from a rest client but I am open to other options if necessary. For example, I queried neo4j with a rest client and set the read timeout (client side) on 2 days. The problem is, that I can't verify whether the query is still running or if the client is simply waiting for the neo4j answer, which will never appear because the query might already be killed in the backend. is there really no possibility to check from the browser or another client which queries are currently running? maybe with an option to terminate them as well.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Measuring Query Performance
To answer your first question, there are two main options for measuring the performance of a query. The first is to use PROFILE; put it in front of a query (like PROFILE MATCH (a:Content)-[:IsTaggedWith]->(t:Term)...), and it will execute the query and display the execution plan used, including the native API calls, number of results from each operation, number of total database hits, and total time of execution.
The downside is that PROFILE will execute the query, so if it is an operation that writes to the database, the changes are persisted. To profile a query without actually executing it, EXPLAIN can be used instead of PROFILE. This will show the query plan and native operations that will be used to execute the query, as well as the estimated total database hits, but it will not actually run the query, so it is only an estimate.
Checking Long Running Queries (Enterprise only)
Checking for running queries can be accomplished using Cypher in Enterprise Edition: CALL dbms.listQueries;. You must be logged in as an admin user to perform the query. If you want to stop a long-running query, use CALL dbms.killQuery() and pass in the ID of the query you wish to terminate.
Note that besides manual killing of a query and timeout of it based on the configured query timeout, unless you have something else set up to kill long-runners, the queries should, in general, not be getting killed on the backend; however, with the above method, you can double-check your assumptions that the queries are indeed executing after sending.
These are available only in Enterprise Edition; there is no way that I am aware of to use these functions or replicate their behavior in Community.

Answer 2

For measuring long running queries I figured out the following approach:
Use a tmux (tmux crash course) terminal session, which is really very easy. Hereby, you can execute your query and close the terminal. Later on you can get back the session.
New session: tmux new -s *sessionName*
Detach from current session (within session): tmux detach
List sessions: tmux ls
Re-attach to session: tmux a -t *sessionName*
Within the tmux session, execute the query via the cypher shell. Either directly in the shell or pipe the command into the shell. The ladder approach is preferable because you can use the unix command time to actually measure the runtime as follows:
time cat query.cypher | cypher-shell -u neo4j -p n > result.txt
The file query.cypher simply conatins the regular query including terminating semicolon at the end. The result of the query will be piped into the result.txt and the runtime of the execution will be displayed in the terminal.
Moreover, it is possible to list the running queries only in the enterprise edition as correctly stated by #rebecca.