Insert MANY key value pairs fast into berkeley db with hash access

Question

i'm trying to build a hash with berkeley db, which shall contain many tuples (approx 18GB of key value pairs), but in all my tests the performance of the insert operations degrades drastically over time. I've written this script to test the performance:

#include<iostream>
#include<db_cxx.h>
#include<ctime>

#define MILLION 1000000

int main () {
    long long a = 0;
    long long b = 0;

    int passes = 0;
    int i = 0;
    u_int32_t flags = DB_CREATE;

    Db* dbp = new Db(NULL,0);
    dbp->set_cachesize( 0, 1024 * 1024 * 1024, 1 );

    int ret = dbp->open(
            NULL,
            "test.db",
            NULL,
            DB_HASH,
            flags,
            0);
    time_t time1 = time(NULL);

    while ( passes < 100 ) {
        while( i < MILLION ) {

            Dbt key( &a, sizeof(long long) );
            Dbt data( &b, sizeof(long long) );

            dbp->put( NULL, &key, &data, 0);
            a++; b++; i++;  
        }

        DbEnv* dbep = dbp->get_env();
        int tmp;
        dbep->memp_trickle( 50, &tmp );

        i=0;
        passes++;
        std::cout << "Inserted one million --> pass: " << passes << " took: " << time(NULL) - time1 << "sec" << std::endl;
        time1 = time(NULL);
    }

}

Perhaps you can tell me why after some time the "put" operation takes increasingly longer and maybe how to fix this.

Thanks for your help, Andreas

Answer 1

You may want to look at the information provided by the db_stat utility and the HASH-specific tuning functions that are available. Please see BDB Reference Guide section on configuring a HASH database.

I would expect you to get 10s of thousands of inserts per second on commodity hardware. What are you experiencing and what is your performance target?

Regards,

Dave