Garbage Collection and Intermittant Search Performance issues

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (https://gist.github.com/1031079).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 daviroberts@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

mlocakall seems quite dangerous:

   Note, this is experimental feature, and might cause the JVM or

shell session to exit if failing to allocate the memory (because not
enough memory is available on the machine).

Can you tell me any more about what it does and how it works?

On Jun 17, 9:45 am, Enrique Medina Montenegro e.medin...@gmail.com
wrote:

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

afaik this should only happen at startup when ES tries to allocate its
memory no?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:53 AM, davrob2 daviroberts@gmail.com wrote:

mlocakall seems quite dangerous:

  Note, this is experimental feature, and might cause the JVM or

shell session to exit if failing to allocate the memory (because not
enough memory is available on the machine).

Can you tell me any more about what it does and how it works?

On Jun 17, 9:45 am, Enrique Medina Montenegro e.medin...@gmail.com
wrote:

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

when using mlockall, you should also used a fixed size heap (min and
max are equal) so it either allocates all of it, or won't start.

An alternative is to just run without swap. On a dedicated elastic
search server anything that gets moved to swap is a bad thing.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Colin Surprenant
colin.surprenant@gmail.com wrote:

afaik this should only happen at startup when ES tries to allocate its
memory no?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:53 AM, davrob2 daviroberts@gmail.com wrote:

mlocakall seems quite dangerous:

  Note, this is experimental feature, and might cause the JVM or

shell session to exit if failing to allocate the memory (because not
enough memory is available on the machine).

Can you tell me any more about what it does and how it works?

On Jun 17, 9:45 am, Enrique Medina Montenegro e.medin...@gmail.com
wrote:

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

Actually, I did miss this big post on dealing with these issues:

http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/0-16-Release-Plan-td2831600.html#a2833637

So I will take this approach and see what happens, including the
mlockall option.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

David.

On Jun 17, 5:55 pm, David Williams williams.da...@gmail.com wrote:

when using mlockall, you should also used a fixed size heap (min and
max are equal) so it either allocates all of it, or won't start.

An alternative is to just run without swap. On a dedicated elastic
search server anything that gets moved to swap is a bad thing.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Colin Surprenant

colin.surpren...@gmail.com wrote:

afaik this should only happen at startup when ES tries to allocate its
memory no?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:53 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

mlocakall seems quite dangerous:

  Note, this is experimental feature, and might cause the JVM or

shell session to exit if failing to allocate the memory (because not
enough memory is available on the machine).

Can you tell me any more about what it does and how it works?

On Jun 17, 9:45 am, Enrique Medina Montenegro e.medin...@gmail.com
wrote:

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.

Regarding the memory settings here: Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

Can anyone recommend the equivalent of ulimit -l for Solaris?

Is it necessary / possible to apply this setting to lock the memory in
Solaris?

When I execute the ulimit command it returns "unlimited", but I'm not
sure if that has anything to do with the "max locked memory" setting.

On Jun 18, 4:06 pm, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Actually, I did miss this big post on dealing with these issues:

http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/0-16-Release-Plan-td2...

So I will take this approach and see what happens, including the
mlockall option.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

David.

On Jun 17, 5:55 pm, David Williams williams.da...@gmail.com wrote:

when using mlockall, you should also used a fixed size heap (min and
max are equal) so it either allocates all of it, or won't start.

An alternative is to just run without swap. On a dedicated elastic
search server anything that gets moved to swap is a bad thing.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Colin Surprenant

colin.surpren...@gmail.com wrote:

afaik this should only happen at startup when ES tries to allocate its
memory no?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:53 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

mlocakall seems quite dangerous:

  Note, this is experimental feature, and might cause the JVM or

shell session to exit if failing to allocate the memory (because not
enough memory is available on the machine).

Can you tell me any more about what it does and how it works?

On Jun 17, 9:45 am, Enrique Medina Montenegro e.medin...@gmail.com
wrote:

Use mlockall in your configuration to see whether it helps:

Elasticsearch Platform — Find real-time answers at scale | Elastic

(see Memory Settings section)

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:43 AM, davrob2 davirobe...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

Yesterday my users were reporting intermittant poor response times for
searches, at the same time garbage collection seems to be running more
often than usual in the index (1031079’s gists · GitHub).

JVM params in elasticsearch.in.sh are ES_MAX_MEM=2g.

My first instinct was to increase the memory to 4g, any other tips on
what I should be doing to prevent this?

Best Regards,

David.