AWS Neptune: More performant to drop Edges before Vertices? - gremlin

Using - Neptune Engine: 1.0.5.1, Apache Tinkerpop: 3.5.2
My question is in regard to the performance of Vertex removal - it is not about the loading of the Vertices.
We have a cron job that clears out a limited number (1000) of "expired" Vertices.
We get hold of and store the vertices to be removed in a Set.
We then remove these via a g.V([vertices]).sideEffect(drop()).next().
This works fine.
All of the Vertices to be removed will have 1 inE and 1 outE.
These Edges obviously get automatically removed when the linked Vertex is removed.
I am wondering though if Neptune (under the hood) would be more performant if we got hold of and removed the Edges first, and then removed the Vertices.
Just wondered if anyone out their (mainly using Neptune, but it is probably a "thing" with other graph databases too) has looked into this and has any hard evidence either way.
Many thanks

As far as using Amazon Neptune - If you are just doing a single threaded drop of 1,000 vertices where each only has one incident edge then what you are doing is fine. If you were dropping thousands (or more) of vertices, in a multi threaded fashion, then dropping the edges first can avoid collisions as different threads may try to get locks on the same object in the database. In such cases, to avoid conflicts, and therefore avoid retries, dropping the edges first can improve performance.

Related

Can I have O(1000s) of vertices connecting to a single vertex and O(1000s) of properties off a vertex for Cosmos DB and/or graph databases?

I have a graph with the following pattern:
- Workflow:
-- Step #1
--- Step execution #1
--- Step execution #2
[...]
--- Step execution #n
-- Step #2
--- Step execution #1
--- Step execution #2
[...]
--- Step execution #n
[...]
-- Step #m
--- Step execution #1
--- Step execution #2
[...]
--- Step execution #n
I have a couple of design questions here:
How many execution documents can hang off a
single vertex without affecting performance? For example, each "step" could have hundreds of 'executions' off it. I'm using two edges to connect them—'has_runs' (from step → execution) and 'execution_step' (from execution → step).
Are graph databases (Cosmos DB or any graph database) designed to handle thousands of vertexes and edges associated with a single vertex?
Each 'execution' has (theoretically) unlimited properties associated with it, but it is probably 10 < x < 100 properties. Is that OK? Are graph databases made to support such a large number properties off a vertex?
All the demos I've seen seem to have < 10 total properties.
Is it appropriate to have so many execution documents hanging off a single vertex? E.g. each "step" could have 100s of 'executions' off it.
Having 100s of edges from a single vertex is not atypical and sounds reasonable. In practice, you can easily find yourself with models that have millions of edges and dig yourself into the problem of supernodes at which point you would need to make some design choices to deal with such things based on your expected query patterns.
Each 'execution' has (theoretically) unlimited properties associated with it, but is probably 10 < x < 100 properties. Is that ok? Are graph databases made to support many, many properties off a vertex?
In designing a schema, I think graph modelers tend to think in terms of graph elements (i.e. vertices/edges) as having the ability to hold unlimited properties, but in practice they have to consider the capabilities of the graph system and not assume them all to be the same. Some graphs, like TinkerGraph will be limited only by available memory. Other graphs like JanusGraph will be limited by the underlying data store (e.g. Cassandra, Hbase, etc).
I'm not aware of any graph system that would have trouble with storing 100 properties. Of course, there's caveats to all such generalities - a few examples:
100 separate simple primitive properties of integers and Booleans is different than 100 byte arrays each holding 100 megabytes of data.
Storing 100 properties is fine on most systems, but do you intend to index all 100? On some systems that might be an issue. Since you tagged your question with "CosmosDB", I will offer that I don't think they are too worried about that since they auto-index everything.
If any of those 100 properties are multi-properties you could put yourself in a position to create a different sort of supernode - a fat vertex (a vertex with millions of properties).
All that said, generally speaking, your schema sounds reasonable for any graph system out there.

Gremlin console keeps returning "Connection to server is no longer active" error

I tried to run a Gremlin query adding a property to vertex through Gremlin console.
g.V().hasLabel("user").has("status", "valid").property(single, "type", "valid")
I constantly get this error:
org.apache.tinkerpop.gremlin.jsr223.console.RemoteException: Connection to server is no longer active
This error happens after query is running for one or two minutes.
I tried some simple queries like g.V().limit(10) and it works fine.
Since the affected vertex count is more than 4 million, not sure if it is failing due to timeout issue.
I also tried to split it into small batches:
g.V().hasLabel("user").has("status", "valid").hasNot("type").limit(200000).property(single, "type", "valid")
It succeeded for first few batches and started failing again.
Is there any recommendations for updating millions of vertices?
The precise approach you take may vary depending on the backend graph database and storage you are using as well as the capacity of the hardware being used.
The capacity of the hardware where Gremlin Server is running in terms of number of CPUs and most importantly, memory, will also be a factor as will the setting of the query timeout value.
To do this in Gremlin, if you had a way to identify distinct ranges of vertices easily you could split this up into multiple threads each doing batches of updates. If the example you show is representative of your actual need then that is likely not possible in this case.
Likewise some graph databases provide a bulk load capability that is often a good way to do large batch updates but probably not an option here as you need to do essentially a conditional update based on looking at the current presence (or not) of a property.
Without more information about your data model and hardware etc. the best answer is probably to do two things:
Use smaller limits. Maybe try 5K or even just 1K at first and work up from there until you find a reliable sweet spot.
Increase the query timeout settings.
You may need to experiment to find the sweet spot for your environment as the capacity of the hardware will definitely play a role in situations like this as well as how you write your query.

Setting a new label on all nodes takes too long in a huge graph

I'm working on a graph containing about 50 million nodes and 40 million relationships.
I need to update every node.
I'm trying to set a new label to these nodes, but it's taking too long.
The label applies to all 50 million nodes, so the operation never ends.
After some research, i found out that Neo4j treats this operation as a single transaction (i don't know if optimistic or not), keeping the changes uncommitted, until the end (which will never happen in this fashion).
I'm currently using Neo4j 2.1.4, which has a feature called "USING PERIODIC COMMIT" (already present in earlier versions). Unfortunately, this feature is coupled to the "LOAD CSV" feature, and not available to every cypher command.
The cypher is quite simple:
match n set n:Person;
I decided to use a workaround, and make some sort of block update, as follows:
match n
where not n:Person
with n
limit 500000
set n:node;
It's ugly, but i couldn't come up with a better solution yet.
Here are some of my confs:
== neo4j.properties =========
neostore.nodestore.db.mapped_memory=250M
neostore.relationshipstore.db.mapped_memory=500M
neostore.propertystore.db.mapped_memory=900M
neostore.propertystore.db.strings.mapped_memory=1300M
neostore.propertystore.db.arrays.mapped_memory=1300M
keep_logical_logs=false
node_auto_indexing=true
node_keys_indexable=name_autocomplete,document
relationship_auto_indexing=true
relationship_keys_indexable=role
execution_guard_enabled=true
cache_type=weak
=============================
== neo4j-server.properties ==
org.neo4j.server.webserver.limit.executiontime=20000
org.neo4j.server.webserver.maxthreads=200
=============================
The hardware spec is:
RAM: 24GB
PROC: Intel(R) Xeon(R) X5650 # 2.67GHz, 32 cores
HDD1: 1.2TB
In this environment, each block update of 500000 nodes took from 200 to 400 seconds. I think this is because every node satisfies the query at the start, but as the updates take place, more nodes need to be scanned to find the unlabeled ones (but again, it's a hunch).
So what's the best course of action whenever an operation needs to touch every node in the graph?
Any help towards a better solution to this will be appreciated!
Thanks in advance.
The most performant way to achieve this is using the batch inserter API. You might use the following recipe:
take a look at http://localhost:7474/webadmin and note the "node count". In fact it's not the number of nodes it's more the highest node id in use - we'll need that later on.
make sure to cleanly shut down your graph database.
take a backup copy of your graph.db directory.
write a short piece of java/groovy/(whatever jvm language you prefer...) program that performs the following tasks
open your graph.db folder using the batch inserter api
in a loop from 0..<node count> (from step above) check if the node with given id exists, if so grab its current labels and amend the list by the new label and use setNodeLabels to write it back.
make sure you run shutdown with the batchinserter
start up your Neo4j instance again

Performance issue with Graph Traversal in ArangoDB

I've set up a simple test case to finally learn some graph databases
I have a simple tree structure based on a collection of roughly 80000 vertices/documents, with around 25 attributes each. The only edges are outbound "is_parent" edges, so to find children of each node, I can simple pick up all inbound edges. I have not set up any specific indices on any fields.
The tree is 20 levels deep and I'm grabbing a random node on the fifth level, to then pick up all descendants of that node using a graph traversal:
FOR t IN GRAPH_TRAVERSAL("sample_tree", "sampleunit/2565130142666", "inbound", {"maxDepth":20}) RETURN t'
This takes a little more than 3 seconds on my dev machine and I feel I might be doing something wrong. Is there any way to speed things up or do I have any conceptual issues?
I set up an example tree-like graph as you described and ran the query on it.
Interestingly, the following query was executing much faster than your query:
FOR t IN TRAVERSAL(sampleunit, unitlinks, "sampleunit/2565130142666", "inbound", {"maxDepth":20}) RETURN t
The query above uses the "older" traversal function in AQL. We checked why there is a performance difference between the two traversal types, and finally found something that can be improved.
The fix for this has been pushed into the 2.2 and devel branches. It is included in commit 9a1eb149aa4da514d709c43a4ebdfd8819ba2f1d if you prefer cherry-picking.
I see similar issue between NEIGHBORS and GRAPH_NEIGHBORS on version 2.6.3, the first is 30 times faster then the second.

Redis: Implement Weighted Directed Graph

What's the best way to implement weighted graph using Redis?
We will mostly search for shortest paths over the graph (probably using the Dijkstra algorithm)
Currently we considered adding the edges to Redis
For each node, we will have the nodeId as the key and a sortedset of keys of referenced nodes
the score of each nodeId in the sortedSet is the weight of the edge.
What do you think? Correct me if I am wrong but the only bummer here is that for each query for the next node in a sortedset we pay O(logn) instead of O(1)...
http://redis.io/commands/zrange
Getting the next item in a sorted set is only O(log(n)) if you are getting them out one at a time, in which case the latency of the connection to redis will be more of an issue than the complexity of the operation.
For most operations on a graph you need to look at all the edges from a node, so it makes sense to load the whole set (or at least those with a suitable score) into local memory when you process the node. This will of course mean loading some edges that will not be followed because you have already found a suitable path, but since the sets are fairly small the cost of this will be far less than making a new call to redis for every edge that you do need.
Sorry for being late :), but I recently came across the same problem, and I modeled it using hashes. I agree with Tom Clarkson that (almost) everything should be loaded into local memory and I augment by saying that an efficient way in terms of space is to use hashes, and store your graph information like this:
Graph = { node1 : { nodeX : edge_weight, nodeY : edge_weight, other_info: bla..},
node2 : { nodeZ : edge_weight, nodeE : edge_weight, other_info: bla..},
bla bla...
}
If you need more space and efficiency, compress every value ( which can be a JSON string...) and decompress/import/deserialize in your client code.

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