I have the feeling that the logging of the server is quite exhaustive. Is there a way to disable or reduce the logging output? It seems that if I send a document to the server it will write the content to stdout which might be a performance killer.
Can I do that somehow?
I found a way to suppress the output from the server. Still my question is how and if I can do this using a command line argument for the actual server. However for a dirty workaround it seems the following can ease the overhead.
Running the server with
java -mx6g -cp "*" edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.StanfordCoreNLPServer -prettyPrint false 2&>1 >/dev/null
where >/dev/null would pipe the output into nothing. Unfortunately this alone did not help. 2&>1 seems to do the trick here. I confess that I do not know what it's actually doing. However, I compared two runs.
Running with 2&>1 >/dev/null
Processed 100 sentences
Overall time: 2.1797 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0218 sec
Processed 200 sentences
Overall time: 6.5694 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0328 sec
...
Processed 1300 sentences
Overall time: 30.482 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0234 sec
Processed 1400 sentences
Overall time: 32.848 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0235 sec
Processed 1500 sentences
Overall time: 35.0417 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0234 sec
Running without additional arguments
ParagraphVectorTrainer - Epoch 1 of 6
Processed 100 sentences
Overall time: 2.9826 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0298 sec
Processed 200 sentences
Overall time: 5.5169 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0276 sec
...
Processed 1300 sentences
Overall time: 54.256 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0417 sec
Processed 1400 sentences
Overall time: 59.4675 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0425 sec
Processed 1500 sentences
Overall time: 64.0688 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0427 sec
This was a very shallow test but it appears that this can have quite an impact. The difference here is a factor of 1.828 which is quite a difference over time.
However, this was just a quick test and I cannot guarantee that my results are completely sane!
Further update:
I assume that this has to do with how the JVM is optimizing the code over time but the time per sentence becomes compareable with the one I am having on my local machine. Keep in mind that I got the results below using 2&>1 >/dev/null to eliminate the stdout logging.
Processed 68500 sentences
Overall time: 806.644 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0118 sec
Processed 68600 sentences
Overall time: 808.2679 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0118 sec
Processed 68700 sentences
Overall time: 809.9669 sec
Time per sentence: 0.0118 sec
You're now the third person that's asked for this :) -- Preventing Stanford Core NLP Server from outputting the text it receives . In the HEAD of the GitHub repo, and in versions 3.6.1 onwards, there's a -quiet flag that prevents the server from outputting the text it receives. Other logging can then be configured with SLF4J, if it's in your classpath.