Single node with properties takes forever to query - neo4j

Question

I have a 50K node graph with 10 properties per node. Each node of the same type but with different values. Each of the properties is on an index and I have increased the heap and page cache memory sizes for the database. However using the browser console, creating the nodes takes 6 minutes!
And also a query for all the properties takes a very long time (~2 minutes) to appear in the browser console but when the results do appear the bottom of the browser says that the result of 50K node properties took only 2500 ms.
How do I improve the performance importing/querying 10's of thousands of unique instances a single node with 10 properties each and no relationships?

Answer 1

It takes time to update 10 different indexes for each node that you create. Do you really have use cases that require an index for every single property? If not, get rid of the indexes you do not need. Remember, indexes can speed up finding the first node(s) to initiate a query, but they do not help at all when traversing paths through a graph.
If you really need all 10 indexes, then to speed up the importing step, you can: drop all the indexes, import all 50K nodes, and then create each index one at a time (which will take some time for each index). The overall time will be about the same, but the import itself should be much faster.
It takes the neo4j browser a very long time to generate and display the visualization for a very large result (e.g., 10's of thousands of nodes). The browser is not intended for viewing that much data at one time.

Answer 2

1) Check that you are running a recent version of Neo4j. 3+ has optimised the way that properties are stored and indexed.
2) Check how you're running the query. Maybe your query is not optimised or is problematic in some way. Note in particular that each MATCH generates a 'row'. Multiple MATCH clauses will yield the Cartesian product of all matched sets, which could be problematic with large armounts of data.
3) Check that each of these properties needs to be attached to a node. Neo4j is optimised for searching for relationships, not for properties.
Consider turning nodes that look like this:
(:Train {
maxSpeedInKPH: 350,
fuelType: 'Diesel',
numberOfEngines: 3
})
to
(:Train)
-[:USES_FUEL_TYPE]->(:Fuel {type: 'Diesel'}),
-[:HAS_MAX_SPEED]->(:MaxSpeed {value: 350, unit: 'k/h'}),
-[:HAS_ENGINE]->(:Engine),
-[:HAS_ENGINE]->(:Engine),
-[:HAS_ENGINE]->(:Engine)
There is generally a benefit to spinning properties out into relationships, even if the uniqueness is low. For example if you have a property which has a unique value per node, generally keep that in the node. But if your 50000 nodes have less, say, 25000 unique values in that property, it would probably still be beneficial to spin them out into relationships. This is absolutely the case with integer-type properties, where you'll also be able to add additional "bucket relationships" to provide a form of indexing. In the example above, the max speed was 350. After spinning the property out into a relationship, you could also put an additional relationship of the type [:HAS_MAX_SPEED_ABOVE]-> 300. This would complicate your querying, but should make it faster.
4) If none of the above apply to you, cannot be implemented or do not help, consider switching to a more traditional relational database like SQL. SQL would be a perfect candidate for your use case, i.e. 50k different nodes (rows) with only 10 different properties (columns) and no relationships (joins).