Difference between revisions of "DbConfig"

Revision as of 00:48, 6 February 2006

Motivation

In our initial investigations of cold-start performance, we theorized that the impact of having hundreds of small xml files to be crawled had a negative impact on performance. We reasoned that combining the hundreds of files into one or two containers would greatly improve the ability of the buffer-cache to work effectively and reduce the startup time.

Experiments

We performed several experiments to get an estimate of the performance gains that could be had. We tried three methodologies that all indicated that we could expect roughly a 1 second improvement on a cold-start of writer. Our test machine for these experiments was a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4HT with 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 120GB 7200rpm SATA drive, running NLD9.

Prestuff

In this experiment, we pre-stuffed the buffer-cache with the xcu files before startup. This was accomplished by running cat:

cat xcu_file_list | xargs cat | cat > /dev/null

Ramdisk

We created two ramdisks and put the configuration data in them. This was a little coarser, because the contents registry was the ramdisk, which also includes the cache.

Const Char*

We created a header file that had all of the contents of the xcu files as const character strings. A simple search function was crafted that took a URL and found the appropriate string. We changed the implimentation of XLayer.readData to look into the strings instead of the disk. Writes were left going to the disk.

Leveraged Backend

At first, we tried to modify localbe to use one large xml file rather than hundreds of smaller ones. This proved to be quite difficult, because the "canned" parser does not expect multiple components per file. Because of the expat interface, it is difficult to craft a system of querying the xml parser for relavent tags and sorting the data. Thus, it was decided that a database system would yeild the fastest implimentation rate.

BerkelyDB was chosen because it was used elsewhere in the code, and is very simple. A simple schema was implimented, where there the key was the url of the xcu file and the value was a struct with the timestamp and the xml blob. There was also a special key, the list of keys, so that searching for children could be done in a moderately efficient manner.

The changes were to XLayer, readData and replaceWith. Additionally, the *Stratum classes had to be changed. These changes were quick and dirty, and in no way production quality. We left LocalSingleBackend and LocalHierarchyBrowserSvc alone, because they weren't used in simple uses of openoffice, and this was just an experiment.

Our performance testing methodology was to use a script that launched openoffice and had it output RTL_LOG data. After a short delay (roughly one minute), the system would be rebooted and the process would repeat. The results were mixed. On a a regular startup, gains were as much as 700 ms, but were not widely reproducable across machines. Fill in data here

Futures