hi brent....

here's what i'm playing around with...

i'm writing a very limited web parsing/scraping app... rather than do a
sequential process, that's time consuming.. i'ver created/tested a kind of
parallel app that quickly spawns a child app for each url i need to fetch.
this can quickly generate 1000s of child processes, each of which is
fetching a given page.... i know, this could easily kill a web server, and
the app limits the workload on the server.. however, since the app does
multiple (100s) of sites, the app can still generate 1000s of pages that are
being fetched.

at the same time, i have a network of servers, (10-20) each of which is
doing the same thing.. fetching pages.

so i have a need to create an architecture/structure to handle this mass of
information and to slam it into the db as fast as possible...

if i have a single central db, the apps will be waiting waaay too long to
get a connection..  if i have a separate db for each server, and have each
app(s) on the server write to the local db, then i'd have to have a process
that somehow collects the local db information, and writes it to the master
db.. doable, but.... this solution would also potentially have a wait, given
the max connection limit of the db.

so this is the dilema i'm facing.

in searching google/academic articles.. i haven't come across a solution for
this kind of issue...

in looking at other crawlers (lucene/nutch/etc...) can't figure out if these
apps have a solution that i can use.

the basic problem as i've stated, boils down to trying to accept as much
data as possible such that this aspect of the whole system isn't the
bottleneck....

yeah, i know.. i'm greedy.. trying to download all of my required
information from a given site in 10-20 mins!!!!! as opposed to hours!!!!

-bruce



-----Original Message-----
From: Brent Baisley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 1:45 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; mysql@lists.mysql.com
Subject: Re: file i/o operations...


Just getting that number of processes running I think would be a challenge.
A setup I recently worked on runs a few hundred
processes per box, and that kind of maxes out the CPU.

Approach 1, been there, done that. Too messy.

Approach 2, considered it, but you may end up with processes that never
connect. You would need a queueing/scheduling mechanism.
Essentially you would be trying to do what an OS does, manage resources to
make sure every process gets it's turn.

Approach 3, what we currently use. The processes connect to the db, does a
bulk insert and then disconnects. We decided to limit
each process to blocks of 100. Inserting a single record at a time will
quickly degrade. This setup actually moved the bottleneck
from the database to the processes doing their job. When each process
starts, it inserts a record into a table and gets it's id. The
process then handles the autoincrement value. The unique id for each record
is then the process "id" plus the increment value.

To really scale, you may want to look into the black hole table format.
Essentially it's a black hole, nothing is saved so there
really isn't much overhead. But you set it up to be replicated and a
replication log is generated. An easy setup would be to have
multiple tables on a "master" server, each table replicating a black hole
table from another server. Then create a merge table
encompassing the multiple tables for easy querying.
This is the next idea we are pursueing, so it may or may not work.

----- Original Message -----
From: "bruce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <mysql@lists.mysql.com>
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 1:12 PM
Subject: file i/o operations...


> hi...
>
> i'm trying to determine which is the better way/approach to go. should an
> app do a great deal of file i/o, or should it do a great deal of
read/writes
> to a mysql db...
>
> my test app will create a number of spawned child processes, 1000's of
> simultaneous processes, and each child process will create data. the data
> will ultimately need to be inserted into a db.
>
> Approach 1
> -----------
> if i have each child app write to a file, i'm going to have a serious hit
on
> the disk, for the file i/o, but i'm pretty sure Centos/RH could handle it.
> (although, to be honest, i don't know if there's a limit to the number of
> simultaneous file descriptors that the OS allows to be open at the same
> time.) i'm assuming that the number is multiples of magnitudes more than
the
> number of simultaneous connections i can have with a db....
>
> i could then have a process/app collect the information from each output
> file, writing the information to the db, and deleting the output files as
> required.
>
> Approach 2
> ----------
> i could have each child app write to a local db, with each child app,
> waiting to get the next open db connection. this is limited, as i'd run
into
> the max connection limit for the db. i'd also have to implement a process
to
> get the information from the local db, to the master db. ..
>
> Approach 3
> -----------
> i could have each child app write directly to the db.. the problem with
this
> approach is that the db has a max regarding the number of simultaneous
> connections, based on system resources. this would be the cleanest
> solution..
>
>
> so... anybody have any thoughts/comments as to how one can essentially
> accept 1000's-10000's of simultaneous hits with an app...
>
> i've been trying to find out if there's any kind of distributed
> parent/child/tiered kind of app, where information/data is more or less
> collected and received at the node level...
>
> does anyone know of a way to create a distributed kind of "db" app, where
i
> can enter information into a db on a given server, and the information is
> essentially pulled into the master server from the child server...
>
>
>
> thanks
>
> -bruce
>
>
> --
> MySQL General Mailing List
> For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
> To unsubscribe:    http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>


-- 
MySQL General Mailing List
For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql
To unsubscribe:    http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to