Cassandra Write Performance – A quick look inside
From the post:
I was looking at Cassandra, one of the major NoSQL solutions, and I was immediately impressed with its write speed even on my notebook. But I also noticed that it was very volatile in its response time, so I took a deeper look at it.
Michael Kopp uses dynaTrace to look inside Cassandra. Lots of information in between and hopefully his conclusion will make you read this posts and those he promises to follow.
Conclusion
NoSQL or BigData Solutions are very very different from your usual RDBMS, but they are still bound by the usual constraints: CPU, I/O and most importantly how it is used! Although Cassandra is lighting fast and mostly I/O bound it’s still Java and you have the usual problems – e.g. GC needs to be watched. Cassandra provides a lot of monitoring metrics that I didn’t explain here, but seeing the flow end-to-end really helps to understand whether the time is spent on the client, network or server and makes the runtime dynamics of Cassandra much clearer.
Understanding is really the key for effective usage of NoSQL solutions as we shall see in my next blogs. New problem patterns emerge and they cannot be solved by simply adding an index here or there. It really requires you to understand the usage pattern from the application point of view. The good news is that these new solutions allow us a really deep look into their inner workings, at least if you have the right tools at hand.
What tools are you using to “look inside” your topic map engine?