Aggregation queries on millions of nodes - neo4j

I'm trying to query ~8 million nodes in a neo4j database. I can do queries which hit the index for exact matches easily enough, but is there a performant way to do aggregations?
MATCH (r:Resident) RETURN r.forename, count(r.forename) ORDER BY count(r.forename)
This query just sits there until I eventually restart my server. I've read the performance guides and I'm watching vm_stat and it seems to be quickly running out of pages free. I've tried tuning the memory / JVM heap settings to various things, but I'm not sure I completely know what I'm doing ;) I've got an 8 GB MacBook Air with an SSD drive in case that's helpful for suggesting settings. Also, here's my stats on my DB from webadmin:
10,236,226 nodes
56,280,161 properties
10,190,430 relationships
2 relationship types
14,535 MB database disk usage

I inserted 8M nodes with just 1 prop, and got this query down to ~20s without changing the default settings (after warming up the cache--first time took 90s), which is comparable to other databases like postgres (which I also tested).
Some things you could try to do:
raise the sizes on the appropriate files mmio settings (as per the file sizes in data/graph.db/) in conf/neo4j.properties (at the top)
increase the node cache size in neo4j.properties
increase the heap init/max in neo4j-wrapper.conf
make sure you have enough RAM left over

Related

Garbage collection tuning/performance degradation for neo4j bulk .csv import

I am running a bulk import of data into a neo4j instance (I have run against 2.2.0 community and enterprise editions as well as 2.1.7 community) running in server mode. My application creates a bunch of nodes in memory, and will peridoically stop to write a series .csv files and send cypher to the neo4j instance to upload the files. (this was done due to performance issues with running the application using the plain old REST API).
Overall, I'm looking to upload something like 150-5000 million nodes, so this is, in principle, the type of thing that neo4j claims to be able to handle relatively well.
Well, anyway, what I'm noticing when I run this against production data is that the application runs in two states -- one where the csv upload processes between 2k-8k of nodes per second, and one where it processes between 80-200 nodes per second. The two states are interwoven when you look at the upload as a time series, and as time goes on, it spends increasingly long amounts of time in the slow state.
Nodes are created through a series of
MERGE (:{NODE_TYPE} {csvLine.key = n.primaryKey}) on create set [PROPERTY LIST];
statements, and I have indexes on everything that I'm doing merges against. This doesn't feel like a degradation in the insert statements, because the slowdown is not linear, but rather bimodal, this feels like there are garbage collection in the neo4j instance. What is the best way to tune the neo4j JVM garbage collector for frequent bulk inserts?
neo4j.properties:
neostore.nodestore.db.mapped_memory=50M
neostore.relationshipstore.db.mapped_memory=500M
#neostore.relationshipgroupstore.db.mapped_memory=10M
neostore.propertystore.db.mapped_memory=100M
#neostore.propertystore.db.strings.mapped_memory=130M
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays.mapped_memory=130M
neo4j-wrapper.conf:
wrapper.java.additional=-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
wrapper.java.additional=-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
wrapper.java.additional=-XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow
wrapper.java.additional=-XX:hashCode=5
wrapper.java.initmemory=8194
wrapper.java.maxmemory=8194
This felt like the sweet spot for both the overall heap memory and the neostore stuff. Increasing the overall heap degraded performance. That said, the neo4j garbage collection logs frequently have that GC (Allocation Failure) message.
EDIT: in response to Michael Hunger:
the machine has 64 GB of RAM, and nothing seems to be maxed out. It also seems like only a small number of cores are being used at any time. Garbage collector profiling shows that the garbage collector seems to be running quite frequently.
The exact cypher statements are, for example:
USING PERIODIC COMMIT 110000 LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM 'file:///home/jschirmer/Event_2015_4_773476.csv' AS csvLine MERGE (s:Event {primaryKey: csvLine.primaryKey}) ON CREATE SET s.checkSum= csvLine.checkSum,s.epochTime= toInt(csvLine.epochTime),s.epochTimeCreated= toInt(csvLine.epochTimeCreated),s.epochTimeUpdated= toInt(csvLine.epochTimeUpdated),s.eventDescription= csvLine.eventDescription,s.fileName= csvLine.fileName,s.ip= csvLine.ip,s.lineNumber= toInt(csvLine.lineNumber),s.port= csvLine.port,s.processPid= csvLine.processPid,s.rawEventLine= csvLine.rawEventLine,s.serverId= csvLine.serverId,s.status= toInt(csvLine.status);
USING PERIODIC COMMIT 110000 LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM 'file:///home/jschirmer/Event__File_2015_4_773476.csv' AS csvLine MATCH (n:SC_CSR{primaryKey: csvLine.Event_id}), (s:File{fileName: csvLine.File_id}) MERGE n-[:DATA_SOURCE]->s;
Though there are serveral such statements being made
I have tried a single concurrent transaction as well as running several (~3) such statements in parallel (which gives a roughly 2x improvement). I've tried tuning the periodic commit frequency, and the size of the file. It seems that this maximizes performance when the csv file is roughly 100k lines, which means that really, the periodic commit can be off.
I have not run profile on the staments. I will do that, but I thought that the eager merget problem was avoided by using MERGE ... on create statements.
IN general your config looks ok, what RAM does your machine have?
For the things you merge against I'd recommend constraint instead of an index.
What's your tx size? And how many concurrent tx do you run?
Instead of your generic merge statement (which wouldn't compile) can you share the concrete statements?
Did you profile the statements? Perhaps you run into the eager pipe problem:
http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2014/10/23/neo4j-cypher-avoiding-the-eager/
Do you use periodic commit?
How large are you CSV files?
See: http://neo4j.com/developer/guide-import-csv/

How to explain the performance of Cypher's LOAD CSV clause?

I'm using Cypher's LOAD CSV syntax in Neo4J 2.1.2. So far it's been a huge improvement over the more manual ETL process required in previous versions. But I'm running into some behavior in a single case that's not what I'd expect and I wonder if I'm missing something.
The cypher query being used is this:
USING PERIODIC COMMIT 500
LOAD CSV FROM 'file:///Users/James/Desktop/import/dependency_sets_short.csv' AS row
MATCH (s:Sense {uid: toInt(row[4])})
MERGE (ds:DependencySet {label: row[2]}) ON CREATE SET ds.optional=(row[3] = 't')
CREATE (s)-[:has]->(ds)
Here's a couple of lines of the CSV:
227303,1,TO-PURPOSE-NOMINAL,t,73830
334471,1,AT-LOCATION,t,92048
334470,1,AT-TIME,t,92048
334469,1,ON-LOCATION,t,92048
227302,1,TO-PURPOSE-INFINITIVE,t,73830
116008,1,TO-LOCATION,t,68204
116007,1,IN-LOCATION,t,68204
227301,1,TO-LOCATION,t,73830
334468,1,ON-DATE,t,92048
116006,1,AT-LOCATION,t,68204
334467,1,WITH-ASSOCIATE,t,92048
Basically, I'm matching a Sense node (previously imported) based on it's ID value which is the fifth column. Then I'm doing a merge to either get a DependencySet node if it exists, or create it. Finally, I'm creating a has edge between the Sense node and the DependencySet node. So far so good, this all works as expected. What's confusing is the performance as the size of the CSV grows.
CSV Lines Time (msec)
------------------------------
500 480
1000 717
2000 1110
5000 1521
10000 2111
50000 4794
100000 5907
200000 12302
300000 35494
400000 Java heap space error
My expectation is that growth would be more-or-less linear, particularly as I'm committing every 500 lines as recommended by the manual, but it's actually closer to polynomial:
What's worse is that somewhere between 300k and 400k rows, it runs into a Java heap space error. Based on the trend from previous imports, I'd expect the import of 400k to take a bit over a minute. Instead, it churns away for about 5-7 minutes before running into the heap space error. It seems like I could split this file into 300,000-line chunks, but isn't that what "USING PERIODIC COMMIT" is supposed to do, more or less? I suppose I could give Neo4J more memory too, but again, it's not clear why I should have to in this scenario.
Also, to be clear, the lookups on both Sense.uid and DependencySet.label are indexed, so the lookup penalty for these should be pretty small. Here's a snippet from the schema:
Indexes
ON :DependencySet(label) ONLINE (for uniqueness constraint)
ON :Sense(uid) ONLINE (for uniqueness constraint)
Any explanations or thoughts on an alternative approach would be appreciated.
EDIT: The problem definitely seems to be in the MATCH and/or CREATE part of the query. If I remove lines 3 and 5 from the Cypher query it performs fine.
I assume that you've already created all the Sense labeled nodes before running this LOAD CSV import. What I think is going on is that as you are matching nodes with the label Sense into memory and creating relationships from the DependencySet to the Sense node via CREATE (s)-[:HAS]->(ds) you are increasing utilization of the available heap.
Another possibility is that the size of your relationship store in your memory mapped settings needs to be increased. In your scenario it looks like the Sense nodes have a high degree of connectivity to other nodes in the graph. When this happens your relationship store for those nodes require more memory. Eventually when you hit 400k nodes the heap is maxed out. Up until that point it needs to do more garbage collection and reads from disk.
Michael Hunger put together an excellent blog post on memory mapped settings for fast LOAD CSV performance. See here: http://jexp.de/blog/2014/06/load-csv-into-neo4j-quickly-and-successfully/
That should resolve your problem. I don't see anything wrong with your query.
i believe the line
MATCH (s:Sense {uid: toInt(row[4])})
makes the time paradigm. somewhere around the 200 000 in the x line of your graph, you have no longer all the Sense nodes in the memory but some of them must be cached to disk. thus all the increase in time is simply re-loading data from cache to memory and vise-versa (otherwise it will be still linear if kept in memory).
maybe if you could post you server memory settings, we could dig deeper.
to the problem of java heap error refer to Kenny's answer

All queries are slow with neo4j

I have written a variety of queries using cypher that take no less than 200ms per query. They're very straightforward, so I'm having trouble identifying where the bottleneck is.
Simple Match with Parameters, 2200ms:
Simple Distinct Match with Parameters, 200ms:
Pathing, 2500ms:
At first I thought the issue was a lack of resources, because I was running neo4j and my application on the same box. While the performance monitor indicated that CPU and memory were largely free'd up and available, I moved the neo4j server to another local box and observed similar latency. Both servers are workstations with fairly new Xeon processors, 12GB memory and SSDs for the data storage. All of the above leads me to believe that the latency isn't due to my hardware. OS is Windows 7.
The graph has less than 200 nodes and less than 200 relationships.
I've attached some queries that I send to neo4j along with the configuration for the server, database, and JVM. No plugins or extensions are loaded.
Pastebin Links:
Database Configuration
Server Configuration
JVM Configuration
[Expanding a bit on a comment I made earlier.]
#TFerrell: Your comments state that "all nodes have labels", and that you tried applying indexes. However, it is not clear if you actually specified the labels in your slow Cypher queries. I noticed from your original question statement that neither of your slower queries actually specified a node label (which presumably should have been "Project").
If your Cypher query does not specify the label for a node, then the DB engine has to test every node, and it also cannot apply an index.
So, please try specifying the correct node label(s) in your slow queries.
Is that the first run or a subsequent run of these queries?
You probably don't have a label on your nodes and no index or unique constraint.
So Neo4j has to scan the whole store for your node pulling everything into memory, loading the properties and checking.
try this:
run until count returns 0:
match (n) where not n:Entity set n:Entity return count(*);
add the constraint
create constraint on (e:Entity) assert e.Id is unique;
run your query again:
match (n:Element {Id:{Id}}) return n
etc.
It seems there is something wrong with the automatic memory mapping calculation when you are on Windows (memory mapping on heap).
I just looked at your messages.log and added up some numbers, so it seems the mmio alone is enough to fill your java heap space (old-gen) leaving no room for the database, caches etc.
Please try to amend that by fixing the mmio config in your conf/neo4j.properties to more sensible values (than the auto-calculation).
For your small store just uncommenting the values starting with #neostore. (i.e. remove the #) should work fine.
Otherwise something like this (fitting for a 3GB heap) for a larger graph (2M nodes, 10M rels, 20M props,10M long strings):
neostore.nodestore.db.mapped_memory=25M
neostore.relationshipstore.db.mapped_memory=250M
neostore.propertystore.db.mapped_memory=250M
neostore.propertystore.db.strings.mapped_memory=250M
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays.mapped_memory=0M
Here are the added numbers:
auto mmio: 134217728 + 134217728 + 536870912 + 536870912 + 1073741824 = 2.3GB
stores sizes: 1073920 + 1073664 + 3221698 + 3221460 + 1073786 = 9MB
JVM max: 3.11 RAM : 13.98 SWAP: 27.97 GB
max heaps: Eden: 1.16, oldgen: 2.33
taken from:
neostore.propertystore.db.strings] brickCount=8 brickSize=134144b mappedMem=134217728b (storeSize=1073920b)
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays] brickCount=8 brickSize=134144b mappedMem=134217728b (storeSize=1073664b)
neostore.propertystore.db] brickCount=6 brickSize=536854b mappedMem=536870912b (storeSize=3221698b)
neostore.relationshipstore.db] brickCount=6 brickSize=536844b mappedMem=536870912b (storeSize=3221460b)
neostore.nodestore.db] brickCount=1 brickSize=1073730b mappedMem=1073741824b (storeSize=1073786b)

Efficient creation of Neo4j relationship indexes

Can you please explain the best way to add relationship indexes to a Neo4j database created using the BatchInserter?
Our database contains about 30 million nodes and about 300 million relationships. If we build this without any indexes then it takes about 10 hours (just calls to BatchInserter.createNode and BatchInserter.createRelationship).
However if we also try to create relationship indexes using LuceneBatchInserterIndexProvider with repeated calls to index.add then the process takes 12 hours to add everything but then gets stuck on indexProvider.shutdown and doesn't complete. The longest I have left it is 3 days. Can you please explain what it is doing at this point? I expected the work to be done during the calls to index.add. What is going on during shutdown that is taking so long?
Our PC has 64GB RAM and we have allocated 40GB to the JVM. During this shutdown step, Windows reports that 99% of the memory is in use (far more than allocated to the JVM) and the computer becomes almost unusable.
The configuration settings I am using are:
neostore.nodestore.db.mapped_memory = 1G
neostore.propertystore.db.mapped_memory = 1G
neostore.propertystore.db.index.mapped_memory = 1M
neostore.propertystore.db.index.keys.mapped_memory = 1M
neostore.propertystore.db.strings.mapped_memory = 1G
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays.mapped_memory = 1M
neostore.relationshipstore.db.mapped_memory = 10G
We've tried changing some of these but it didn't appear to make any difference.
We have also tried adding the relationship indexes as a separate step after first building the database without any indexes. In this case we used GraphDatabaseFactory.newEmbeddedDatabaseBuilder and GraphDatabaseService.index().forRelationships. Doing it this way seems to work although it was estimated that it would take around 6 days to complete. We have tried invoking commit at various different intervals which makes some difference but not significant. Most of the time seems to be spent just iterating over the relationships.
The only thing I can think of that may be abnormal about our data is that the relationships have about 20 properties on them. But even creating an index on just 1 of these properties doesn't work.
The file sizes without any indexes are:
neostore.nodestore.db 400MB
neostore.propertystore.db 100GB
neostore.propertystore.db.strings 2GB
neostore.relationshipstore.db 10GB
Can you please give us some advice on how to get this working either during the BatchInserter process or as a separate step?
We are using version 2.0.1 of the Neo4j jars.
Thanks, Damon

Why is there this Capacity Limit on Nodes and Relationships in neo4j?

I wonder why neo4j has a Capacity Limit on Nodes and Relationships. The limit on Nodes and Relationships is 2^35 1 which is a "little" bit more then the "normal" 2^32 integer. Common SQL Databases for example mysql stores there primary key as int(2^32) or bigint(2^64)2. Can you explain me the advantages of this decision? In my opinion this is a key decision point when choosing a database.
It is an artificial limit. They are going to remove it in the not-too-distant future, although I haven't heard any official ETA.
Often enough, you run into hardware limits on a single machine before you actually hit this limit.
The current option is to manually shard your graphs to different machines. Not ideal for some use cases, but it works in other cases. In the future they'll have a way to shard data automatically--no ETA on that either.
Update:
I've learned a bit more about neo4j storage internals. The reason the limits are what they are exactly, are because the id numbers are stored on disk as pointers in several places (node records, relationship records, etc.). To increase it by another power of 2, they'd need to increase 1 byte per node and 1 byte per relationship--it is currently packed as far as it will go without needing to use more bytes on disk. Learn more at this great blog post:
http://digitalstain.blogspot.com/2010/10/neo4j-internals-file-storage.html
Update 2:
I've heard that in 2.1 they'll be increasing these limits to around another order of magnitude higher than they currently are.
As of neo4j 3.0, all of these constraints are removed.
Dynamic pointer compression expands Neo4j’s available address space as needed, making it possible to store graphs of any size. That’s right: no more 34 billion node limits!
For more information visit http://neo4j.com/blog/neo4j-3-0-massive-scale-developer-productivity.

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