December 2012
5 posts
Performance Tips: MongoDB at Firescope
Guest post by Pete Whitney
Starting to work with any new technology or new API is always challenging at first. You’re often not quite sure of the best ways to get things done or if you’re are using the new technology in the most efficient manner. Furthermore, the early learning process is often littered with trial and error improvements that unfortunately take time to rework and reengineer into more optimal solutions. It sure would be nice if we could short circuit this learning process and simply arrive at nirvana on the first cut. While I won’t proclaim that the destination of the blog is nirvana, I will try to short circuit the learning process by sharing four specific performance related tips that we learned at FireScope Inc. when we transitioned from MySQL to MongoDB for our improved cloud based Stratis product. This blog will share the shorthand version of these tips and point the reader to a more in depth rendering if further understanding is desired.
- Through a comparative analysis FireScope found that accessing MongoDB via the MongoDB java driver was three times faster than doing the same access using SpringData. While SpringData yields many benefits it accomplishes its job using a reflection based solution that is performed on top of the native MongoDB java driver. So for FireScope’s performance centric considerations paying a 3X performance penalty for its benefits was not a tradeoff we were willing to make.
3D Repo Runs MongoDB
If you’re an architectural or engineering firm, you’ve undoubtedly confronted the difficulty of managing and collaborating on 3D assets like CAD drawings. The act of sharing massive files is hard but feasible, but it is significantly complicated by the inability to determine that you’re using the latest version. For the CAD-inclined, there’s hope. Jozef Dobos, a doctoral student at University College London (UCL), has applied the geospatial indexing capabilities of MongoDB a version control system for 3D assets called 3D Repo. Sponsored by Arup Foresight, the built environment innovation division of Arup Group Limited, a global design and business consulting firm with offices in over 30 countries, 3D Repo leverages the flexibility of MongoDB’s data model, not to mention its geospatial capabilities, to make collaboration on 3D assets easy.
November Driver Releases
On November 27, all 10gen supported drivers were updated with new error checking and reporting defaults. Each driver now has a MongoClient connection class to handle the error checking. On the same day there was also a server release with fixes on 2.2
MongoQP: MongoDB Slow Query Profiler
Two times a year 10gen’s Drivers and Innovations team gather together for a face to face meeting to work together and setting goals for the upcoming six months. This year the team broke up into teams for an evening hackathon. MongoQP, a query profiler, was one of the hacks presented by Jeremy Mikola, PHP Evangelist at 10gen.
Logging slow queries is essential for any database application, and MongoDB makes doing so relatively painless with its database profiler. Unfortunately, making sense of the system.profile collection and tying its contents back to your application requires a bit more effort. The heart of mongoqp (Mongo Query Profiler) is a bit of map/reduce JS that aggregates those queries by their BSON skeleton (i.e. keys preserved, but values removed). With queries reduced to their bare structure, any of their statistics can be aggregated, such as average query time, index scans, counts, etc.
