[rabbitmq-discuss] Question on RabbitMQ and file I/O characteristics

Mon Aug 5 18:11:37 BST 2013

Thanks for the background Simon.

One statement caught my attention though:

> At 40 msg/s you are publishing slowly enough that RabbitMQ probably won't
start to coalesce these events together.

In my original message I didn't lay out all my results - I was trying to
keep the question simple. That said, the 4 write/sec pattern held up at
higher rates. For instance, on a machine with a faster disk, the same test
could do 400 messages/sec, and per tools like sar, were seeing 1600 disk
writes/sec.

As you can imagine, at those I/O rater we're rapidly coming close to the
disk's ability to keep up, thus the question about the writes/message rates.

So with this additional context, any additional insight?

Thanks,

Matt

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 2:59 AM, Simon MacMullen <simon at rabbitmq.com> wrote:

> That filename is typical of those of a queue index journal. That's the
> file that records the state of messages in the queue - when a message has
> been published, when it's been confirmed (transactional publish is
> internally implemented in terms of confirms), when it's been delivered, and
> when it's been acknowledged (I assume you are using acks).
>
> So it is very possible to get four disk writes to the journal per message
> for publish / confirm / deliver / ack.
>
> At 40 msg/s you are publishing slowly enough that RabbitMQ probably won't
> start to coalesce these events together. So as you start to publish faster
> you should start to see fewer writes per message - eventually you should
> see many messages per write.
>
> Therefore I wouldn't try to scale the numbers you're seeing up to predict
> anything - you're likely to be much better off running some benchmark with
> MulticastMain or similar.
>
> Cheers, Simon
>
>
> On 03/08/2013 01:08, Matt Pietrek wrote:
>
>> Just want to run this past the RabbitMQ devs and see if this jibes with
>> their expectations.
>>
>> Our typical cluster runs RabbitMQ 3.02 on Ubuntu 10.04 on two nodes.
>> All queues are mirrored. All our channels are opened in transactional
>> mode. (We know, this causes things to go slower - That's OK with us, we
>> really want to avoid message loss.)
>>
>> What I'm seeing is that for each message written to the broker, we see
>> approximately four disk writes. That is, if the broker is doing 40
>> messages/sec, we see ~160 disk writes. We're getting these number from
>>
>> Is this about what should be expected when running this way?
>>
>> If it helps, I dug in a bit more to see what the files were. The vast
>> majority of the activity seems to be to files like this:
>>
>> msg_store_persistent/743.rdq
>> queues/**E10F54B1OGM7M4LTRX5Z3L4K0/**journal.jif
>>
>> Any insight would be very valuable for our planning processes.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Matt
>>
>>
>> ______________________________**_________________
>> rabbitmq-discuss mailing list
>> rabbitmq-discuss at lists.**rabbitmq.com<rabbitmq-discuss at lists.rabbitmq.com>
>> https://lists.rabbitmq.com/**cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/**rabbitmq-discuss<https://lists.rabbitmq.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rabbitmq-discuss>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/attachments/20130805/a359d1b1/attachment.htm>