[badgerdb] vlog growing unbounded - consider adding GC and exposing options

[woodzy]

I noticed that BadgerDB storage started growing unbounded (it was many files and several gigabytes quite quickly). Looks like the Badgerhold/Badger Storage example doesn't provide a way for the user to utilize GC correctly per Badgers docs. https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger/blob/main/db.go#L1225

Fairly sure the option tuning is probably useful to expose as well somehow -- for example ValueLogFileSize has a pretty large default

I didn't plumb up a full fix, just copied the default and started experimenting, but this showed that something like option tuning and GC can resolve the infinite growth modified a copy of the default to include some signalling and a regular GC call.

I would recommend at least adding the GC as a default. I would also suggest lowering some of the default or exposing them.

        go func() {
                ticker := time.NewTicker(5 * time.Minute)
                defer ticker.Stop()
                for { 
                        select {
                                case <- ticker.C:
                                        _ = h.db.Badger().RunValueLogGC(0.7)
                                        continue
                                case <- h.doneCh:
                                        return
                        }
                }
        }()

[werbenhu]

I've checked the official documentation of Badger regarding garbage collection. @woodzy , you're right.

Since neither of us has experience using BadgerDB in a production environment, if you could, it would be great if you could submit a PR. This would be very helpful for most users who use BadgerDB as a persistent database.

Garbage Collection

Badger values need to be garbage collected, because of two reasons:

• Badger keeps values separately from the LSM tree. This means that the compaction operations that clean up the LSM tree do not touch the values at all. Values need to be cleaned up separately.

• Concurrent read/write transactions could leave behind multiple values for a single key, because they are stored with different versions. These could accumulate, and take up unneeded space beyond the time these older versions are needed.

DB.RunValueLogGC(): This method is designed to do garbage collection while Badger is online. Along with randomly picking a file, it uses statistics generated by the LSM-tree compactions to pick files that are likely to lead to maximum space reclamation. It is recommended to be called during periods of low activity in your system, or periodically. One call would only result in removal of at max one log file. As an optimization, you could also immediately re-run it whenever it returns nil error (indicating a successful value log GC), as shown below.

ticker := time.NewTicker(5 * time.Minute)
defer ticker.Stop()
for range ticker.C {
again:
 err := db.RunValueLogGC(0.7)
 if err == nil {
       goto again
 }
}

Memory usage

Badger’s memory usage can be managed by tweaking several options available in the Options struct that is passed in when opening the database using DB.Open.

• Number of memtables (Options.NumMemtables) If you modify Options.NumMemtables, also adjust Options.NumLevelZeroTables and Options.NumLevelZeroTablesStall accordingly.
• Number of concurrent compactions (Options.NumCompactors)
• Size of table (Options.BaseTableSize)
• Size of value log file (Options.ValueLogFileSize)
  If you want to decrease the memory usage of Badger instance, tweak these options (ideally one at a time) until you achieve the desired memory usage.

[werbenhu]

@woodzy Can this #371 fix the issue?

[woodzy]

Thanks! These look like better implementations of my local workarounds during experimentation.

[mochi-co]

This should be fixed in v2.6.0 - please let us know!

[OpenJarvisAI]

It not fix, still growing on mem

[werbenhu]

@woodzy @OpenJarvisAI Could this issue be closed?