[LUCENE-2293] IndexWriter has hard limit on max concurrency

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.0-ALPHA
• Component/s: core/index
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Michael McCandless
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 03/Mar/10 20:58
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 12:21
• Resolved: 15/Mar/10 14:13

Description

DocumentsWriter has this nasty hardwired constant:

private final static int MAX_THREAD_STATE = 5;

which probably I should have attached a //nocommit to the moment I
wrote it

That constant sets the max number of thread states to 5. This means,
if more than 5 threads enter IndexWriter at once, they will "share"
only 5 thread states, meaning we gate CPU concurrency to 5 running
threads inside IW (each thread must first wait for the last thread to
finish using the thread state before grabbing it).

This is bad because modern hardware can make use of more than 5
threads. So I think an immediate fix is to make this settable
(expert), and increase the default (8?).

It's tricky, though, because the more thread states, the less RAM
efficiency you have, meaning the worse indexing throughput. So you
shouldn't up and set this to 50: you'll be flushing too often.

But... I think a better fix is to re-think how threads write state
into DocumentsWriter. Today, a single docID stream is assigned across
threads (eg one thread gets docID=0, next one docID=1, etc.), and each
thread writes to a private RAM buffer (living in the thread state),
and then on flush we do a merge sort. The merge sort is inefficient
(does not currently use a PQ)... and, wasteful because we must
re-decode every posting byte.

I think we could change this, so that threads write to private RAM
buffers, with a private docID stream, but then instead of merging on
flush, we directly flush each thread as its own segment (and, allocate
private docIDs to each thread). We can then leave merging to CMS
which can already run merges in the BG without blocking ongoing
indexing (unlike the merge we do in flush, today).

This would also allow us to separately flush thread states. Ie, we
need not flush all thread states at once – we can flush one when it
gets too big, and then let the others keep running. This should be a
good concurrency gain since is uses IO & CPU resources "throughout"
indexing instead of "big burst of CPU only" then "big burst of IO
only" that we have today (flush today "stops the world").

One downside I can think of is... docIDs would now be "less
monotonic", meaning if N threads are indexing, you'll roughly get
in-time-order assignment of docIDs. But with this change, all of one
thread state would get 0..N docIDs, the next thread state'd get
N+1...M docIDs, etc. However, a single thread would still get
monotonic assignment of docIDs.

Issue Links

• is blocked by: LUCENE-2294 Create IndexWriterConfiguration and store all of IW configuration there
• relates to: LUCENE-2324 Per thread DocumentsWriters that write their own private segments