The document discusses benchmarking the performance of SolrCloud clusters. It describes Timothy Potter's experience operating a large SolrCloud cluster at Dachis Group. It outlines an methodology for benchmarking indexing performance by varying the number of servers, shards, and replicas. Results show near-linear scalability as nodes are added. The document also introduces the Solr Scale Toolkit for deploying and managing SolrCloud clusters using Python and AWS. It demonstrates integrating Solr with tools like Logstash and Kibana for log aggregation and dashboards.

1. Search | Discover | Analyze
Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Benchmarking Solr
Performance
June 18, 2014
Timothy Potter

2. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
My SolrCloud Experience
• At LucidWorks, mostly focused on hardening SolrCloud; Lucene/Solr
committer
• Operated 36 node cluster in AWS for Dachis Group (1.5 years ago, 18
shards ~900M docs)
• Built a Fabric/boto framework for deploying and managing a cluster in
EC2
• Co-author of Solr In Action

3. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Agenda
• Indexing performance tests
• Solr Scale Toolkit
• Next steps

4. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Cluster sizing
How many servers do I need to index X docs?
... shards ... ?
... replicas ... ?
I need N queries per second over
M docs, how many servers do I need?
It depends?!?

5. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Methodology
• Transparent repeatable results
– Ideally hoping for something owned by the community
• Synthetic docs ~ 1K each on disk, mix of field types
– Data set created using code borrowed from PigMix
– English text fields generated using a Zipfian distribution
• Java 1.7u55, Amazon Linux, r3.2xlarge nodes
– enhanced networking enabled, placement group, same AZ
• Stock Solr (cloud) 4.8.1
– Using Shawn Heisey’s GC tuning parameters
• Use Elastic MapReduce to generate load
– As many nodes as I need to drive Solr!

6. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Indexing Results
Cluster Size # of Shards # of Replicas Reducers Time (secs) Docs / sec
10 10 1 48 1762 73,780
10 10 2 34 3727 34,881
10 20 1 48 1282 101,404
10 20 2 34 3207 40,536
10 30 1 72 1070 121,495
10 30 2 60 3159 41,152
15 15 1 60 1106 117,541
15 15 2 42 2465 52,738
15 30 1 60 827 157,195
15 30 2 42 2129 61,062

7. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Direct Updates
Indexing
Client 1
CloudSolrServer
(SolrJ)
ZooKeeper
/clusterstate.json
Shard 1
(leader)
Shard 2
(leader)
Shard 3
(leader)
<doc>
<doc>
Watch
/clusterstate.json
<doc>
<doc>
compute shard
assignment on
clientbatch

8. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Replication
CloudSolrServer
(SolrJ)
ZooKeeper
/clusterstate.json
Shard 1
(leader)
Shard 2
(leader)
Shard 3
(leader)
<doc>
<doc>
Watch
/clusterstate.json
<doc>
Shard 1
(replica)
Shard 2
(replica)
Shard 3
(replica)
Blocks for response
from replica(s)

9. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Don’t swamp your servers!

10. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Lessons Learned
• Know what throughput your client side is capable of
generating
– If in MapReduce, index from reducers with speculative execution
disabled
• Don’t change Solr config without good reasons for doing
so
• Overshard (but not too much)
• Near-linear scalability as I added nodes!

11. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Query Performance Tests
• All nodes in SolrCloud perform indexing and execute queries
• Using the TermsComponent to build queries based on the terms in
each field.
• Harder to accurately simulate user queries over synthetic data
– Need mix of faceting, paging, sorting, grouping, boolean clauses, range
queries, boosting, filters (some cached, some not), etc ...
• Does the randomness in your test queries model (expected) user
behavior?
• Start with one server (1 shard) to determine baseline query
performance.
– Look for inefficiencies in your schema and other config settings

12. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Solr Scale Toolkit
• Fabric / Python based toolset for deploying and
managing SolrCloud clusters
• SolrJ-based client application useful for building
tools that need access to cluster state information
in ZooKeeper
• Code to support benchmarks for Solr

13. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Python-based Tools
boto – Python API for AWS (EC2, S3, etc)
Fabric – Python-based tool for automating system admin tasks
over SSH
pysolr – Python library for Solr (sending commits, queries, ...)
kazoo – Python client tools for ZooKeeper
Supporting Cast:
JMeter – run tests, generate reports
collectd – system monitoring
Logstash4Solr – log aggregation
JConsole/VisualVM – monitor JVM during indexing / queries

14. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Solr Scale Toolkit: Demo
• Launch a meta node
– Log agg / basic monitoring using SiLK
• Launch ZooKeeper Ensemble
– 3 nodes to establish quorum
– Setup cron job to clean-up snapshots
• Launch SolrCloud cluster
• Create new collection and index some docs
– Attach JConsole while indexing
• Run a healthcheck on the collection
• Checkout Banana Dashboard
• Backup / Restore
– Requires patch for SOLR-5956
– Use fab patch_jars to update jars and do a rolling restart

15. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• Custom built AMI?
• Block device mapping
– dedicated disk per Solr node
• Launch and then poll status until they are live
– verify SSH connectivity
• Tag each instance with a cluster ID and username
Provisioning machines
fab new_ec2_instances:test1,n=3,instance_type=m3.xlarge

16. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• Two options:
– provision 1 to N nodes when you launch Solr cluster
– use existing named ensemble
• Fabric command simply creates the myid
files and zoo.cfg file for the ensemble
– and some cron scripts for managing snapshots
• Basic health checking of ZooKeeper status:
– echo srvr | nc localhost 2181
ZooKeeper
fab new_zk_ensemble:zk1,n=3

17. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• Upload a BASH script that starts/stops Solr
• Set system props: jetty.port, host, zkHost, JVM
opts
• One or more Solr nodes per machine
• JVM mem opts dependent on instance type and
# of Solr nodes per instance
• Optionally configure log4j.properties to append
messages to Rabbitmq for Logstash4Solr
integration
SolrCloud
fab new_solrcloud:test1,zk=zk1,nodesPerHost=2

18. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• BASH script that implements:
– start/stop Solr nodes on each EC2 instance
– sets JVM memory options, system properties
(jetty.port), enable remote JMX, etc
– backup log files before restarting nodes
– ensure JVM is killed correctly before restarting
• Environment variables in:
solr-ctl-env.sh
solr-ctl.sh

19. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• Deploy a configuration directory to ZooKeeper
• Create a new collection
• Attach a local JConsole/VisualVM to a remote JVM
• Rolling restart (with Overseer awareness)
• Build Solr locally and patch remote
– Use a relay server to scp the JARs to Amazon network once and then
scp them to other nodes from within the network
• Put/get files
• Grep over all log files (across the cluster)
Miscellaneous Utility Tasks

20. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• fab mine: See clusters I’m running (or for other users too)
• fab kill_mine: Terminate all instances I’m running
– Use termination protection in production
• fab ssh_to: Quick way to SSH to one of the nodes in a
cluster
• fab stop/recover/kill: Basic commands for controlling
specific Solr nodes in the cluster
• fab jmeter: Execute a JMeter test plan against your cluster
– Example test plan and Java sampler is included with the source
Other useful stuff ...

21. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
• Java-based command-line application that uses SolrJ’s
CloudSolrServer to perform advanced cluster
management operations:
– healthcheck: collect metadata and health information from all
replicas for a collection from ZooKeeper
– backup: create a snapshot of each shard in a collection for
backing up to remote storage (S3)
• Framework for building complex tools that benefit from
having access to cluster state information in ZooKeeper
SolrCloud Tools (SolrJ client app)
./tools.sh –tool healthcheck

22. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
SiLK Integration
• SiLK: Solr integrated with Logstash and Kibana
– Index time-series data, such as log data (collectd, Solr logs, ...)
– Build cool dashboards with Banana (fork of Kibana)
• Easily aggregate all WARN and more severe log
messages from all Solr servers into logstash4solr
• Send collectd metrics to logstash4solr

23. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
SiLK Integration

24. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
What’s Next?
• Migrate to using Apache libcloud instead of using boto
directly
• Benchmark mixed work-loads (queries and indexing)
• SiLK is improving rapidly!
• Chaos monkey tests
– integrate jepsen?
• Open source so please kick the tires!

25. Confidential and Proprietary © Copyright 2013
Wrap-up
• Solr Scale Toolkit: https://github.com/LucidWorks/solr-scale-tk
• LucidWorks: http://www.lucidworks.com
• SiLK: http://www.lucidworks.com/lucidworks-silk/
• Solr In Action: http://www.manning.com/grainger/
• Connect: @thelabdude / tim.potter@lucidworks.com
Questions?