Besides waiting for the new updater, it may be useful to tell us, what
we as users can do too. It is unclear to me what the problem is. For
instance, at one point I was worried that the many parallel requests to
the SPARQL endpoint that we make in Scholia is a problem. As far as I
understand it is not a problem at all. Another issue could be the way
that we use Magnus Manske's Quickstatements and approve bots for high
frequency editing. Perhaps a better overview and constraints on
large-scale editing could be discussed?
To be (again) completely honest, we don't entirely understand the issue either. There are clearly multiple related issues. In high level terms, we have at least:
* Some part of the update process on Blazegraph is CPU bound and single threaded. Even with low query load, if we have a high edit rate, Blazegraph can't keep up, and saturates a single CPU (with plenty of available resources on other CPUs). This is a hard issue to fix, requiring either splitting the processing over multiple CPU or sharding the data over multiple servers. Neither of which Blazegraph supports (at least not in our current configuration).
* There is a race for resources between edits and queries: a high query load will impact the update rate. This could to some extent be mitigated by reducing the query load: if no one is using the service, it works great! Obviously that's not much of a solution.
What you can do (short term):
* Keep bots usage well behaved (don't do parallel queries, provide a meaningful user agent, smooth the load over time if possible, ...). As far as I can see, most usage are already well behaved.
* Optimize your queries: better queries will use less resources, which should help. Time to completion is a good approximation of the resources used. I don't really have any more specific advice, SPARQL is not my area of expertise.
What you can do (longer term):
* Help us think out of the box. Can we identify higher level use cases? Could we implement some of our workflows on a higher level API than SPARQL, which might allow for more internal optimizations?
* Help us better understand the constraints. Document use cases on [1].
Sadly, we don't have the bandwidth right now to engage meaningfully in this conversation. Feel free to send thoughts already, but don't expect any timely response.
Yet another thought is the large discrepancy between Virginia and Texas
data centers as I could see on Grafana [1]. As far as I understand the
hardware (and software) are the same. So why is there this large
difference? Rather than editing or BlazeGraph, could the issue be some
form of network issue?
As pointed out by Lucas, this is expected. Due to how our GeoDNS works, we see more traffic on eqiad than on codfw.
Thanks for the help!
Guillaume
[1]
https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000489/wikidata-query-service?panelId=8&fullscreen&orgId=1&from=now-7d&to=now
/Finn
On 14/11/2019 10:50, Guillaume Lederrey wrote:
> Hello all!
>
> As you've probably noticed, the update lag on the public WDQS endpoint
> [1] is not doing well [2], with lag climbing to > 12h for some servers.
> We are tracking this on phabricator [3], subscribe to that task if you
> want to stay informed.
>
> To be perfectly honest, we don't have a good short term solution. The
> graph database that we are using at the moment (Blazegraph [4]) does not
> easily support sharding, so even throwing hardware at the problem isn't
> really an option.
>
> We are working on a few medium term improvements:
>
> * A dedicated updater service in Blazegraph, which should help increase
> the update throughput [5]. Finger crossed, this should be ready for
> initial deployment and testing by next week (no promise, we're doing the
> best we can).
> * Some improvement in the parallelism of the updater [6]. This has just
> been identified. While it will probably also provide some improvement in
> throughput, we haven't actually started working on that and we don't
> have any numbers at this point.
>
> Longer term:
>
> We are hiring a new team member to work on WDQS. It will take some time
> to get this person up to speed, but we should have more capacity to
> address the deeper issues of WDQS by January.
>
> The 2 main points we want to address are:
>
> * Finding a triple store that scales better than our current solution.
> * Better understand what are the use cases on WDQS and see if we can
> provide a technical solution that is better suited. Our intuition is
> that some of the use cases that require synchronous (or quasi
> synchronous) updates would be better implemented outside of a triple
> store. Honestly, we have no idea yet if this makes sense and what those
> alternate solutions might be.
>
> Thanks a lot for your patience during this tough time!
>
> Guillaume
>
>
> [1] https://query.wikidata.org/
> [2]
> https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000489/wikidata-query-service?orgId=1&from=1571131796906&to=1573723796906&var-cluster_name=wdqs&panelId=8&fullscreen
> [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238229
> [4] https://blazegraph.com/
> [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T212826
> [6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238045
>
> --
> Guillaume Lederrey
> Engineering Manager, Search Platform
> Wikimedia Foundation
> UTC+1 / CET
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikidata mailing list
> Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
>
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