Cluster Capacity Planning

This document outlines the various elements and variables to keep in mind when planning your Riak cluster. Your use case and environment variables will be specific to what you’re building, but this document should set you on the right path when planning and launching a Riak cluster.

RAM

RAM is the most important resource when sizing your Riak cluster. Memory keeps data closer to your users. Memory is essential for running complex MapReduce queries or caching data to provide low-latency request times.

Bitcask and Memory Requirements

Your choice of local storage backend for Riak impacts your RAM needs. Though Riak has pluggable backend storage, Bitcask is the default. Why? Because it’s built for:

• low-latency request times
• high throughput
• the ability to handle data sets much larger than RAM w/o degradation

Bitcask’s one major requirement, however, is that it must keep the entire keydir in memory. The keydir is a hash table that maps each concatenated bucket + key name in a Bitcask (“a Bitcask” is the name for each file contained within each Bitcask backend) to a fixed-size structure giving the file, offset, and size of the most recently written entry for that bucket + key on disk.

To learn about Bitcask see Hello Bitcask on the Riak blog as well as the Introduction to Bitcask paper.

If your calculated RAM needs will exceed your hardware resources–in other words, if you can’t afford the RAM to use Bitcask—we recommend that you use LevelDB.

Check out Bitcask Capacity Planning for more details on designing a Bitcask-backed cluster.

LevelDB

If RAM requirements for Bitcask are prohibitive, we recommend use of the LevelDB backend. While LevelDB doesn’t require a large amount of RAM to operate, supplying it with the maximum amount of memory available leads to higher performance.

For more information see LevelDB.

Disk

Now that you have an idea of how much RAM you’ll need, it’s time to think about disk space. Disk space needs are much easier to calculate. Below is an equation to help you calculate disk space needs:

Estimated Total Objects * Average Object Size * n_val

For example:

• 50,000,000 objects
• an average object size of two kilobytes (2,048 bytes)
• the default n_val of 3

Then you would need just over approximately 286 GB of disk space in the entire cluster to accommodate your data.

We believe that databases should be durable out of the box. When we built Riak, we did so in a way that you could write to disk while keeping response times below your users’ expectations. So this calculation assumes that you’ll be keeping the entire data set on disk.

Many of the considerations taken when configuring a machine to serve a database apply to configuring a node for Riak as well. Mounting disks with noatime and having separate disks for your OS and Riak data lead to much better performance. See Planning for a Riak System for more information.

Disk Space Planning and Ownership Handoff

When Riak nodes fail or leave the cluster, other nodes in the cluster start the ownership handoff process. Ownership handoff is when remaining nodes take ownership of the data partitions handled by an absent node. One side effect of this process is that the other nodes require more intensive disk space usage; in rare cases filling the disk of one or more of those nodes.

When making disk space planning decisions, we recommend that you:

• assume that one or more nodes may be down at any time
• monitor your disk space usage and add additional space when usage exceeds 50-60% of available space.

Another possibility worth considering is using Riak with a filesystem that allows for growth, for example LVM, RAID, or ZFS.

Read/Write Profile

Read/write ratios, as well as the distribution of key access, should influence the configuration and design of your cluster. If your use case is write heavy, you will need less RAM for caching, and if only a certain portion of keys is accessed regularly, such as a Pareto distribution, you won’t need as much RAM available to cache those keys’ values.

Number of Nodes

The number of nodes (i.e. physical servers) in your Riak Cluster depends on the number of times data is replicated across the cluster. To ensure that the cluster is always available to respond to read and write requests, we recommend a “sane default” of N=3 replicas. This requirement can be met with a 3 or 4-node cluster.

For production deployments, however, we recommend using no fewer than 5 nodes, as node failures in smaller clusters can compromise the fault-tolerance of the system. Additionally, in clusters smaller than 5 nodes, a high percentage of the nodes (75-100% of them) will need to respond to each request, putting undue load on the cluster that may degrade performance. For more details on this recommendation, see our blog post on Why Your Riak Cluster Should Have at Least Five Nodes.

Scaling

Riak can be scaled in two ways: vertically, via improved hardware, and horizontally, by adding more nodes. Both ways can provide performance and capacity benefits, but should be used in different circumstances. The riak-admin cluster command can assist scaling in both directions.

Vertical Scaling

Vertical scaling, or improving the capabilities of a node/server, provides greater capacity to the node but does not decrease the overall load on existing members of the cluster. That is, the ability of the improved node to handle existing load is increased but the load itself is unchanged. Reasons to scale vertically include increasing IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second), increasing CPU/RAM capacity, and increasing disk capacity.

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling, or increasing the number of nodes in the cluster, reduces the responsibilities of each member node by reducing the number of partitions and providing additional endpoints for client connections. That is, the capacity of each individual node does not change but its load is decreased. Reasons to scale horizontally include increasing I/O concurrency, reducing the load on existing nodes, and increasing disk capacity.

Note on horizontal scaling

When scaling horizontally, it’s best to add all planned nodes at once with multiple riak-admin cluster join commands followed by a riak-admin cluster plan and riak-admin cluster commit. This will help reduce the amount of data transferred between nodes in the cluster.

Reducing Horizontal Scale

If a Riak cluster is over provisioned, or in response to seasonal usage decreases, the horizontal scale of a Riak cluster can be decreased using the riak-admin cluster leave command.

Ring Size/Number of Partitions

Ring size is the number of partitions that make up your Riak cluster. Ring sizes must be a power of 2. Ring size is configured before your cluster is started, and is set in your configuration files.

The default number of partitions in a Riak cluster is 64. This works for smaller clusters, but if you plan to grow your cluster past 5 nodes we recommend a larger ring size.

The minimum number of partitions recommended per node is 10. You can determine the number of partitions allocated per node by dividing the number of partitions by the number of nodes.

There are no absolute rules for the ideal partitions-per-node ratio. This depends on your particular use case and what features the Riak cluster uses. We recommend between 10 and 50 data partitions per node.

So if you’re running a 3-node development cluster, a ring size of 64 or 128 should work just fine. While a 10-node cluster should work well with a ring size of 128 or 256 (64 is too small while 512 is likely too large).

The table below provides some suggested combinations:

By extension, a ring size of 1024 is advisable only in clusters with more than 20 nodes, 2048 in clusters with more than 40 nodes, etc.

If you’re unsure about the best number of partitions to use, consult the Riak mailing list for suggestions from the Riak community.

Other Factors

Riak is built to run in a clustered environment, and while it will compensate for network partitions, they do cause increased load on the system. In addition, running in a virtualized environment that lacks low-latency IO access can drastically decrease performance. Before putting your Riak cluster in production is recommended that you gain a full understanding of your environment’s behavior so that you know how your cluster performs under load for an extended period of time. Doing so will help you size your cluster for future growth and lead to optimal performance.

We recommend using Riak Bench for benchmarking the performance of your cluster.

Bandwidth

Riak uses Erlang’s built-in distribution capabilities to provide reliable access to data. A Riak cluster can be deployed in many different network environments. We recommend that you produce as little latency between nodes as possible, as high latency leads to sub-optimal performance.

Deploying a single Riak cluster across two datacenters is not recommended. If your use case requires this capability, Riak offers a Multi Data Center Replication: Architecture option that is built to keep multiple Riak clusters in sync across several geographically diverse deployments.

• Learn more about Riak Enterprise.

I/O

In general, the biggest bottleneck for Riak will be the amount of I/O available to it, especially in the case of write-heavy workloads. Riak functions much like any other database and the design of your disk access should take this into account. Because Riak is clustered and your data is stored on multiple physical nodes, you should consider forgoing a traditional RAID setup for redundancy and focus on providing the least latency possible using SATA Drives or SSDs, for example.