Hi Geert,
If I could, I would delete 8664 from the ITS system entirely as it was filed based on
invalid information that was provided to me. It generally should be ignored.
When a write operation is performed with LMDB, the freelist is scanned for available space
to reuse if possible. The larger the size of the freelist, the longer amount of time it
will take for the operation to complete successfully. When the database has gotten to a
certain point of fragmentation (This differs based on any individual use case), it will be
start taking a noticeable amount of time for those write operations to complete and the
server processing the write operation does essentially come to a halt during this process.
Once the write operation completes, things go back to normal. The only solution is to
dump and reload the database (slapcat/slapadd or mdb_copy -c). Eventually, you will get
back into the same situation and have to do this again.
A recent option was added to the slapd-mdb configuration (rtxnsize) that can also help
reduce the rate of fragmentation. There are some performance related issues you can find
discussed on the -devel list from when it was added. Whether or not you are affected by
them and whether or not the setting will help you in particular depends on whether or not
your searches result in a large number of entries being returned. You can find some
guidelines around tuning the parameter that I came up with in that thread. If you do not
have an unlimited Zimbra License, the license check performed by the store servers will
definitely affect this, since the result set is all active accounts which can be quite
large.
Additionally, I had at one point had a patch for the Zimbra build of OpenLDAP that made it
very aggressive in finding freespace to reuse. I don't recall if it is still applied
(I don't believe it currently is based on what I saw in github). It basically meant
that in Zimbra, it would work extra hard to find reusable freespace, which would reduce
the rate at which the database would fragment, but it also meant that once the DB was
fragmented enough, it would amplify the amount of time it took for a write op to complete.
I.e., it was a tradeoff of a longer time to reach a catastrophic state, but the state was
more catastrophic once achieved.
This is one area where LMDB differs significantly from back-hdb/bdb. You could have
back-bdb/hdb databases that endured a high rate of write operations be in effect for years
w/o needing maintenance. With LMDB, you get better read & write rates, but it
requires periodic reloads.
Hope this helps!
--Quanah
----- Original Message -----
From: "Geert Hendrickx" <geert(a)hendrickx.be>
To: "openldap-technical" <openldap-technical(a)openldap.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 4:53:32 AM
Subject: mdb fragmentation
Hi
We have an OpenLDAP 2.4.44 based, 4-way MMR setup with 4 M entries,
which is fairly write intensive (Zimbra).
Lately we've seen very frequent lockups of the master that receives
the updates (only 1 out of 4), whereas the replicas stay responsive.
According to -d stats logs, all threads suddenly take a long time to
answer any queries, and slapd can no longer accept new connections.
The issue always disappears again without intervention, but usually
hits a number of times in a row, on an almost daily basis.
We tested a lot of things, but eventually "solved" the issue with a
slapcat and slapadd of the database - the master server has been
completely stable again since. The mdb was also reduced 50% in size.
Looking at the old mdb (prior to the dump), mdb_stat -f shows it had
over 3.7 M free pages. Could it be an issue of database fragmentation
similar to ITS#8664?
Is it natural that the freelist (and thus the mdb) gets this big over
time, I would expect those free pages to get reused constantly?
And in that case would it make sense to monitor the number of free
pages? Is there a threshold to look for, before things get problematic
again? (ITS#7770 would come handy here, as we already monitor/graph
various metrics from the monitor backend)
Geert
--
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--
--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Product Architect
Symas Corporation
Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP:
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