Neo4J Memory tuning having little effect - memory

I am currently running some simple cypher queries (count etc) on a large dataset (>10G) and am having some issues with tuning NE04J.
The machine running the queries has 4TB of ram, 160 cores and is running Ubuntu 14.04/neo4j version 2.3. Originally I left all the settings as default as it is stated that free memory will be dynamically allocated as required. However, as the queries are taking several minutes to complete I assumed this was not the case. As such I have set various combinations of the following parameters within the neo4j-wrapper.conf:
wrapper.java.initmemory=1200000
wrapper.java.maxmemory=1200000
dbms.memory.heap.initial_size=1200000
dbms.memory.heap.max_size=1200000
dbms.jvm.additional=-XX:NewRatio=1
and the following within neo4j.properties:
use_memory_mapped_buffers=true
neostore.nodestore.db.mapped_memory=50G
neostore.relationshipstore.db.mapped_memory=50G
neostore.propertystore.db.mapped_memory=50G
neostore.propertystore.db.strings.mapped_memory=50G
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays.mapped_memory=1G
following every guide/Stackoverflow post I could find on the topic, but I seem to have exhausted the available material with little effect.
I am running queries through the shell using the following command neo4j-shell -c < "queries/$1.cypher", but have also tried explicitly passing the conf files with -config $NEO4J_HOME/conf/neo4j-wrapper.conf (restarting the sever everytime I make a change).
I imagine that I have missed something silly which is causing the issue, as there are many reports of neo4j working well with data of this size, but cannot think what it could be. As such any help would be greatly appreciated.

Type :SCHEMA in your neo4j browser to show if you have indexes.
Share a couple of your queries.
In the neo4j.properties file, you need to set the dbms.pagecache.memory setting to about 1.5x the size of your database files. In your example, you can set it to 15g

Related

How to check the amount of times a neo4J index was used?

So I received a dated schema that used to work well at the beginning but it's experiencing some scaling issues.
Among of them, the space used by the indexes is catching my attention so I would like to know if they are being used, how many times, etc.
Other that explaining/profiling queries, is there anything else I could use to have this kind of information?
The information you are looking for would be under metrics monitoring, but index accesses is not one of the available metrics Neo4j provides. (Neo4j supports Prometheus, but I don't know if Prometheus captures that info either)
But there are some indirect ways you can get this data.
Assuming you have a test server that replicates production, with appropriate load tests, you can try removing the index and seeing how it affects the load tests. (This way is a bit cumbersome, but probably gives the most accurate measure of how varies DB changes affect performance, but only if the load tests accurately reflect production use.)
Alternatively, for a more static analysis, you should only be executing pre-defined, parameterized cyphers. So you can Profile/Explain those Cyphers against the DB at different scales, and compare those notes to the Cypher logs (either calling end, or using Neo4j metrics monitoring) to get an idea of how often each one is called.

Dataflow job takes too long to start

I'm running a job which reads about ~70GB of (compressed data).
In order to speed up processing, I tried to start a job with a large number of instances (500), but after 20 minutes of waiting, it doesn't seem to start processing the data (I have a counter for the number of records read). The reason for having a large number of instances is that as one of the steps, I need to produce an output similar to an inner join, which results in much bigger intermediate dataset for later steps.
What should be an average delay before the job is submitted and when it starts executing? Does it depend on the number of machines?
While I might have a bug that causes that behavior, I still wonder what that number/logic is.
Thanks,
G
The time necessary to start VMs on GCE grows with the number of VMs you start, and in general VM startup/shutdown performance can have high variance. 20 minutes would definitely be much higher than normal, but it is somewhere in the tail of the distribution we have been observing for similar sizes. This is a known pain point :(
To verify whether VM startup is actually at fault this time, you can look at Cloud Logs for your job ID, and see if there's any logging going on: if there is, then some VMs definitely started up. Additionally you can enable finer-grained logging by adding an argument to your main program:
--workerLogLevelOverrides=com.google.cloud.dataflow#DEBUG
This will cause workers to log detailed information, such as receiving and processing work items.
Meanwhile I suggest to enable autoscaling instead of specifying a large number of instances manually - it should gradually scale to the appropriate number of VMs at the appropriate moment in the job's lifetime.
Another possible (and probably more likely) explanation is that you are reading a compressed file that needs to be decompressed before it is processed. It is impossible to seek in the compressed file (since gzip doesn't support it directly), so even though you specify a large number of instances, only one instance is being used to read from the file.
The best way to approach the solution of this problem would be to split a single compressed file into many files that are compressed separately.
The best way to debug this problem would be to try it with a smaller compressed input and take a look at the logs.

How to configure Neo4j to run in a minimal memory environment?

For demo purposes, I am running Neo4j in a low memory environment -- A laptop with 4GB of RAM, 1644MB is use for video memory, leaving only 2452 MB available for use.. It's also running SQL Server, our WCF services, and our clients.. So there's little memory for Neo4j.
I'm running LOAD CSV cypher scripts via REST from a C# service. There are more than 20 scripts, and theyt work well in a server environment. I've written code to paginate, so that they run in smaller batches. I've reduced the batch size very low ( 25 csv rows ) and a given script may do 300 batches, but I continue to get "Java heap space" errors at some point.
I've tried configuring Neo4j with a relatively large heap space ( 640MB ) which is all the available RAM size plus setting the cache_type to none, and it gets much further before I get the java heap space error. What I don't understand is in that case, why does it grow that much? Also until I restart the neo4j service, I get these java heap space errors quickly. The batch size doesn't seem to impact how much memory is used appreciably.
However, after doing that, and I run the application with these settings, the query performance becomes very slow due to the cache settings.
I am running this on a Windows 7 laptop with 4G RAM -- using Neo4j 2.2.1 Community Edition.
Thoughts?
Perhaps you can share your LOAD CSV statement and the other queries you run.
I think you just run into this:
http://markhneedham.com/blog/2014/10/23/neo4j-cypher-avoiding-the-eager/
So PROFILE or EXPLAIN your queries and make it not to use that much intermediate state. We can help if you share your statements.
And you should use PERIODIC COMMIT 100.
Something like:
heap=512M
dbms.pagecache.memory=200M
keep_logical_logs=false
cache_type=none
http://console.neo4j.org runs neo4j in memory putting up to 50 instances in a single gigabyte of memory. So it should be doable.

neo4j broken/corrupted after ungraceful shutdown

I'm using Neo4j over windows for testing purposes and I'm working with a db containing ~2 million relations and about the same amount of nodes. after I had an ungraceful shutdown of neo4j while writing a batch of relations the db got corrupted.
it seems like there are some broken nodes/relations in the db and whenever I try to read them I get this error (I'm using py2neo):
Error: NodeImpl#1292315 not found. This can be because someone else deleted this entity while we were trying to read properties from it, or because of concurrent modification of other properties on this entity. The problem should be temporary.
I tried rebooting but neo4j fails to recover from this error. I found this question:
Neo4j cannot read certain nodes. Throws NotFoundException. Corrupt database
but the answer he got is no good for me because it involved in going over the db and redo the indexing, and I can't even read those broken nodes/relations so I can't fix their index (tried it and got the same error).
In general I've had many stability issues with neo4j (and on multiple platforms, not just windows). if no decent solution is found for this problem I will have to switch to a different database.
thanks in advance!
I wrote a tool a while ago that allows you to copy a broken store and keeps the good records intact.
You might want to check it out. I assume you used the 2.1.x version of Neo4j.
https://github.com/jexp/store-utils/tree/21
For 2.0.x check out:
https://github.com/jexp/store-utils/tree/20
To verify if your datastore is consistent follow the steps mentioned in http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2014/01/22/neo4j-backup-store-copy-and-consistency-check/.
Are you referring to batch inserter API when speaking of "while writing a batch of relations"?
If so, be aware that batch inserter API requires a clean shutdown, see the big fat red warning on http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/batchinsert.html.
Are the broken nodes schema indexed and are you attempting to read them via this indexed label/property? If so, it's possible you may have a broken index following the sudden shutdown.
Assuming this is the case, you could try deleting the schema subdirectory within the graph store directory while the server is not running and let the database rebuild the index on restart. While this isn't an official way to recover from a broken index, it can sometimes work. Obviously, I suggest you back up your store before trying this.

Neo4j 2.0.4 browser cannot query large datasets

Whenever I try to run cypher queries in Neo4j browser 2.0 on large (anywhere from 3 to 10GB) batch-imported datasets, I receive an "Unknown Error." Then Neo4j server stops responding, and I need to exit out using Task Manager. Prior to this operation, the server shuts down quickly and easily. I have no such issues with smaller batch-imported datasets.
I work on a Win 7 64bit computer, using the Neo4j browser. I have adjusted the .properties file to allow for much larger memory allocations. I have configured my JVM heap to 12g, which should be fine for 64bit JDK. I just recently doubled my RAM, which I thought would fix the issue.
My CPU usage is pegged. I have the logs enabled but I don't know where to find them.
I really like the visualization capabilities of the 2.0.4 browser, does anyone know what might be going wrong?
Your query is taking a long time, and the web browser interface reports "Unknown Error" after a certain timeout period. The query is still running, but you won't see the results in the browser. This drove me nuts too when it first happened to me. If you run the query in the neo4j shell you can verify whether or not this is the problem, because the shell won't time out.
Once this timeout occurs, you can find that the whole system becomes quite non-responsive, especially if you re-run the query, because now you have two extremely long queries running in parallel!
Depending on the type of query, you may be able to improve performance. Sometimes it's as simple as limiting the number of returned nodes (in cases where you only need to find one node or path).
Hope this helps.
Grace and peace,
Jim

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