[ovs-discuss] OVN Database sizes - Auto compact feature

Mark Michelson mmichels at redhat.com
Thu Mar 8 20:31:08 UTC 2018


Most of the data in this thread has been pretty easily explainable based 
on what I've seen in the code compared with the nature of the data in 
the southbound database.

The southbound database tends to have more data in it than other 
databases in OVS, due especially to the Logical_Flow table. The result 
is that auto shrinking of the database does not shrink it down by as 
much as other databases. You can see in Daniel's graphs that each time 
the southbound database is shrunk, its "base" size ends up noticeably 
larger than it previously was.

Couple that with the fact that the database has to increase to 4x its 
previous snapshot size in order to be shrunk, and you can end up with a 
situation after a while where the "shrunk" southbound database is 750MB, 
and it won't shrink again until it exceeds 3GB.

To fix this, I think there are a few things that can be done:

* Somehow make the southbound database have less data in it. I don't 
have any real good ideas for how to do this, and doing this in a 
backwards-compatible way will be difficult.

* Ease the requirements for shrinking a database. For instance, once the 
database reaches a certain size, maybe it doesn't need to grow by 4x in 
order to be a candidate for shrinking. Maybe it only needs to double in 
size. Or, there could be some time cutoff where the database always will 
be shrunk. So for instance, every hour, always shrink the database, no 
matter how much activity has occurred in it (okay, maybe not if there 
have been 0 transactions).

On 03/07/2018 02:50 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> OK.
> 
> I guess we need to investigate this issue from the basics.
> 
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 09:02:02PM +0100, Daniel Alvarez Sanchez wrote:
>> With OVS 2.8 branch it never shrank when I started to delete the ports since
>> the DB sizes didn't grow, which makes sense to me. The conditions weren't
>> met for further compaction.
>> See attached image.
>>
>> NB:
>> 2018-03-07T18:25:49.269Z|00009|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnnb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (647.317 seconds old, 436 transactions, 10505382
>> bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T18:35:51.414Z|00012|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnnb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (602.089 seconds old, 431 transactions, 29551917
>> bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T18:45:52.263Z|00015|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnnb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (600.563 seconds old, 463 transactions, 52843231
>> bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T18:55:53.810Z|00016|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnnb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (601.128 seconds old, 365 transactions, 57618931
>> bytes)
>>
>>
>> SB:
>> 2018-03-07T18:33:24.927Z|00009|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnsb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (1102.840 seconds old, 775 transactions,
>> 10505486 bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T18:43:27.569Z|00012|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnsb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (602.394 seconds old, 445 transactions, 15293972
>> bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T18:53:31.664Z|00015|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnsb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (603.605 seconds old, 385 transactions, 19282371
>> bytes)
>> 2018-03-07T19:03:42.116Z|00031|ovsdb_file|INFO|/opt/stack/data/ovs/ovnsb_db.db:
>> compacting database online (607.542 seconds old, 371 transactions, 23538784
>> bytes)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Daniel Alvarez Sanchez <dalvarez at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> No worries, I just triggered the test now running OVS compiled out of
>>> 2.8 branch (2.8.3). I'll post the results and investigate too.
>>>
>>> I have just sent a patch to fix the timing issue we can see in the traces I
>>> posted. I applied it and it works, I believe it's good to fix as it gives
>>> us
>>> an idea of how frequent the compact is, and also to backport if you
>>> agree with it.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 7:13 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at ovn.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> OK, thanks.
>>>>
>>>> If this is a lot of trouble, let me know and I'll investigate directly
>>>> instead of on the basis of a suspected regression.
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 07:06:50PM +0100, Daniel Alvarez Sanchez wrote:
>>>>> All right, I'll repeat it with code in branch-2.8.
>>>>> Will post the results once the test finishes.
>>>>> Daniel
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 7:03 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at ovn.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 05:53:15PM +0100, Daniel Alvarez Sanchez
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> Repeated the test with 1000 ports this time. See attached image.
>>>>>>> For some reason, the sizes grow while deleting the ports (the
>>>>>>> deletion task starts at around x=2500). The weird thing is why
>>>>>>> they keep growing and the online compact doesn't work as when
>>>>>>> I do it through ovs-appctl tool.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I suspect this is a bug and eventually it will grow and grow unless
>>>>>>> we manually compact the db.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Would you mind trying out an older ovsdb-server, for example the one
>>>>>> from OVS 2.8?  Some of the logic in ovsdb-server around compaction
>>>>>> changed in OVS 2.9, so it would be nice to know whether this was a
>>>>>> regression or an existing bug.
>>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
> 
> 



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