Webinar: Choosing the Right Shard Key for High Performance and Scale

Ger HartnettDirector of Technical Services (EMEA), MongoDB @ghartnett #MongoDB

Tales from the FieldPart three: Choosing the Right Shard Key for High-Performance and Scale

Or:●Cautionary Tales●Don’t solve the wrong problems●Bad schemas & shard keys hurt ops too

●The main talk should take 30-35 minutes

●You can submit questions via the chat box

●We’ll answer as many as possible at the end

●We are recording and will send slides Friday

●This is the final webinar in a series of 3

Before we start

●You work in operations●You work in development●You have a MongoDB system in production

●You have contacted MongoDB Technical Services (support)

●You attended an earlier webinar in the series (part1, part2)

A quick poll - add a word to the chat to let me know your perspective

●We collect - observations about common mistakes - to share the experience of many

●Names have been changed to protect the (mostly) innocent

●No animals were harmed during the making of this presentation (but maybe some DBAs and engineers had light emotional scarring)

●While you might be new to MongoDB we have deep experience that you can leverage

Stories

1.Discovering a DR flaw during a data centre outage

2.Complex documents, memory and an upgrade “surprise”

3.Wild success “uncovers” the wrong shard key

The Stories (part three today)

Story #1: Quick Review

Story #1: Recovering from a disaster●Prospect in the process of signing up for a subscription

●Called us late on Friday, data centre power outage and 30+ (11 shards) servers down

●When they started bringing up the first shard, the nodes crashed with data corruption

●17TB of data, very little free disk space, JOURNALLING DISABLED!

Recovering each shard1.Start secondary

read only2.Mount NFS

storage for repair3.Repair former

primary node4.Iterative rsync to

seed a secondary

Secondary

Primary

Secondary

Key takeaways for you●If you are departing significantly from standard config, check with us (i.e. if you think journalling is a bad idea)

●Two DC in different buildings on different flood plains, not in the path of the same storm (i.e. secondaries in AWS)

●DR/backups are useless if you haven’t tested them

Story #2: Complex documents, memory and an upgrade “surprise”●Well established ecommerce site selling diverse goods in 20+ countries

●After switching to wired tiger in production, performance dropped, this is the opposite of what they were expecting

{ _id: 375 en_US : { name : ..., description : ..., <etc...> }, en_GB : { name : ..., description : ..., <etc...> }, fr_FR : { name : ..., description : ..., <etc...> }, de_DE : ..., de_CH : ..., <... and so on for other locales... > inventory: 423}

Product Catalog: Original Schema

Key Takeaways●When doing a major version/storage-engine upgrade, test in staging with some proportion of production data/workload

●Sometimes putting everything into one document is counter productive

Story #3: Wild success uncovers the wrong shard key●Started out as error “[Balancer] caught

exception … tag ranges not valid for: db.coll”

●11 shards, they had added 2 new shards to keep up traffic - 400+ databases

●Lots of code changes ahead of the Superbowl

●Spotted slow 300+s queries, decided to build some indexes without telling us

●Went production down

Adding Shards

2 More Shards….

The “Golden Hammer” Tendency

Diagnosing the issues #1●The red-herring hunt begins●Transparent Huge Pages enabled - production

●Chaotic call - 20 people talking at once, then in the middle of the call everything started working again

●Barrage of tickets and calls●Connection storms

Using mtools to analyse logs - conn churn

Diagnosing the issues #2●Got inconsistent and missing log files●Discovered repeated scatter-gather queries returning the same results

●Secondary reads●Heavy load on some shards and low disk space

Insert load on two shards (from Cloud Manager)

Diagnosing the issues #3● Shard key - string with year/month & customer id

{ _id : ObjectId("4c4ba5e5e8aabf3"), count: 1025, changes: { … } modified : { date : "2015_02", customerId: 314159 }}

Diagnosing the issues #4●First heard about DDOS attack●Missing tag ranges on some collections●Stopped the balancer which reduced system load from chunk moves

●Two clusters had a mongos each on the same server

Fixing the issues●Script to fix the tag ranges●Proposed finer granularity shard key - but

this was not possible because of 30TB of data

●Moved mongos to dedicated servers●Re-enable the balancer for short windows

with waitForDelete and secondaryThrottle●Put together scripts to pre-split and move

empty chunks to quiet shards based on traffic from month before

Monthly pre-split and move chunks

{ date : "2015_03",

customerId: min-500

customerId: 314159

customerId: 501-10000

customerId: 10001-300k

customerId: 300k-314158

customerId: 314160-max

The diagnosis in retrospect●The outage did not appear to have been

related to either the invalid tag ranges or the earlier failed moves

●The step downs did not help resolve the outage but did highlight some queries that need to be fixed

●The DDoS was the ultimate cause of the outage - lead to diagnosis of deeper issues

●The deepest issue was the shard key

Aftermath and lessons learned●Signed up for a Named TSE●Now doing pre-split and move before the end of every month

●Check before making other changes (i.e. building new indexes)

Key takeaways for you●Choosing a shard key is a pivotal decision - make it carefully

●Understand current bottleneck●Monitor insert distribution and chunk ranges

●Look for slow queries (logs & mtools)●Run mongos, mongod, config server on dedicated server or use containers/cgroups

Further ReadingProduction notesdocs.mongodb.org/manual/administration/production-notes

Mtoolsgithub.com/rueckstiess/mtools

Previous Webinarsmongodb.com/presentations

Ger HartnettDirector Technical Services (EMEA), MongoDB

@ghartnett #MongoDB

Questions?

●You can submit questions via the chat box

●We are recording and will send slides Friday

Questions

Code GerHartnett gets 25% discount