Erratic behavior of Neo4j while loading datas - neo4j

Question

We're loading data in a Neo4j Server which represents mainly (almost) k-ary trees with k between 2 and 10 in most case. We have about 50 node types possible, and about same amount of type of relationships.
The server is online and data can be loaded from several instances (So, unhappily, we can't use neo4j-import)
We experience very slow loading for about 100 000 nodes and relationships, which take about 6mn to load in a good machine. Sometimes we experience loading of the same datas which takes 40mn ! Looking at the neo4j process, it sometime doing nothing....
In this case, we have messages like :
WARN [o.n.k.g.TimeoutGuard] Transaction timeout. (Overtime: 1481 ms).
Beside we don't experience problems with query which execute quickly despite very complex structures
We load data as follow :
A cypher file is loaded like this :
neo4j-shell -host localhost -v -port 1337 -file myGraph.cypher
The cypher file contains several sections :
Constraints creations :
CREATE CONSTRAINT ON (p:MyNodeType) ASSERT p.uid IS UNIQUE;
Index on very little set of Nodes (10 at more)
We carefully select these to avoid counter performance behaviours.
CREATE INDEX ON :MyNodeType1(uid);
Nodes creations
USING PERIODIC COMMIT 4000 LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:////tmp/my.csv" AS csvLine CREATE (p:MyNodeType1 {Prop1: csvLine.prop1, mySupUUID: toInt(csvLine.uidFonctionEnglobante), lineNum: toInt(csvLine.lineNum), uid: toInt(csvLine.uid), name: csvLine.name, projectID: csvLine.projectID, vValue: csvLine.vValue});
Relationships creations
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:////tmp/RelsInfixExpression-vLeftOperand-SimpleName_javaouille-normal-b11695.csv" AS csvLine Match (n1:MyNodeType1) Where n1.uid = toInt(csvLine.uidFather) With n1, csvLine Match (n2:MyNodeType2) Where n2.uid = toInt(csvLine.uidSon) MERGE (n1)-[:vOperandLink]-(n2);
Question 1
We experienced, sometimes, OOM in Neo4j server while loading datas, difficult to reproduce even with the same datas. But having recently added USING PERIODIC COMMIT 1000 to relationships loading commands, we never reproduced this problem. Could it is possibly the solution for OOM problem ?
Question 2
Is the Periodic Commit parameter good ?
Is there another way to speed up data loading ? Ie. another strategy to write the data loading script ?
Question 3
Is there ways to prevent timeout ? With another way to write the data loading script or maybe JVM tuning ?
Question 4
Some months ago we splited the cypher script in 2 or 3 parts to launch it concurrently, but we stoped that because the server messed up the data frequently and became unusable. Is there a way to split "cleanly" the script and launch them concurrently ?

Answer 1

Question 1: Yes, USING PERIODIC COMMIT is the first thing to try when LOAD CSV causes OOM errors.
Question 2&3: The "sweet spot" for periodic commit batch size depends on your Cypher query, your data characteristics, and how your neo4j server is configured (all of which can change over time). You do not want the batch size to be too high (to avoid occasional OOMs), nor too low (to avoid slowing down the import). And you should tune the server's memory configuration as well. But you will have to do your own experimentation to discover the best batch size and server configuration, and adjust them as needed.
Question 4: Concurrent write operations that touch the same nodes and/or relationships must be avoided, as they can cause errors (like deadlocks and constraint violations). If you can split up your operations so that they act on completely disjoint subgraphs, then they should be able to run concurrently without these kinds of errors.
Also, you should PROFILE your queries to see how the server will actual execute them. For example, even if both :MyNodeType1(uid) and :MyNodeType2(uid) are indexed (or have uniqueness constraints), that does not mean that the Cypher planner will automatically use those indexes when it executes your last query. If your profile of that query shows that it is not using the indexes, then you can add hints to the query to make the planner (more likely to) use them:
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:////tmp/RelsInfixExpression-vLeftOperand-SimpleName_javaouille-normal-b11695.csv" AS csvLine
MATCH (n1:MyNodeType1) USING INDEX n1:MyNodeType1(uid)
WHERE n1.uid = TOINT(csvLine.uidFather)
MATCH (n2:MyNodeType2) USING INDEX n2:MyNodeType2(uid)
WHERE n2.uid = TOINT(csvLine.uidSon)
MERGE (n1)-[:vOperandLink]-(n2);
In addition, if it is OK to store the uid values as strings, you can remove the uses of TOINT().This will speed up things to some extent.