3 billion items in Java Map with 16 GB RAM

One rainy evening I meditated about memory managment in Java and how effectively Java collections utilise memory. I made simple experiment, how much entries can I insert into Java Map with 16 GB of RAM?

Goal of this experiment is to investigate internal overhead of collections. So I decided to use small keys and small values. All tests were made on Linux 64bit Kubuntu 12.04. JVM was 64bit Oracle Java 1.7.0_09-b05 with HotSpot 23.5-b02. There is option to use compressed pointers (-XX:+UseCompressedOops), which is on by default on this JVM.

First is naive test with java.util.TreeMap. It inserts number into map, until it runs out of memory and ends with exception. JVM settings for this test was -Xmx15G

import java.util.*; 
Map m = new TreeMap();
for(long counter=0;;counter++){
  m.put(counter,"");
  if(counter%1000000==0) System.out.println(""+counter);
}

This example ended at 172 milion entries. Near the end insertion rate slowed down thanks to excesive GC activity. On second run I replaced TreeMap with `HashMap, it ended at 182 milions.

Java default collections are not most memory efficient option. So lets try an memory-optimized . I choosed LongHashMap from MapDB, which uses primitive long keys and is optimized to have small memory footprint. JVM settings is again -Xmx15G

import org.mapdb.*
LongMap m = new LongHashMap();    
for(long counter=0;;counter++){
  m.put(counter,"");
  if(counter%1000000==0) System.out.println(""+counter);
}

This time counter stopped at 276 million entries. Again near the end insertion rate slowed down thanks to excesive GC activity.
It looks like this is limit for heap-based collections, Garbage Collection simply brings overhead.

Now is time to pull out the big gun :-). We can always go of-heap where GC can not see our data. Let me introduce you to MapDB, it provides concurrent TreeMap and HashMap backed by database engine. It supports various storage modes, one of them is off-heap memory. (disclaimer: I am MapDB author).

So lets run previous example, but now with off-heap Map. First are few lines to configure and open database, it opens direct-memory store with transactions disabled. Next line creates new Map within the db.

import org.mapdb.*

DB db = DBMaker
   .newDirectMemoryDB()
   .transactionDisable()
   .make();

Map m = db.getTreeMap("test");
for(long counter=0;;counter++){
  m.put(counter,"");
  if(counter%1000000==0) System.out.println(""+counter);
}

This is off-heap Map, so we need different JVM settings: -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=15G -Xmx128M. This test runs out of memory at 980 million records.

But MapDB can do better. Problem in previous sample is record fragmentation, b-tree node changes its size on each insert. Workaround is to hold b-tree nodes in cache for short moment before they are inserted. This reduces the record fragmentation to minimum. So lets change DB configuration:

DB db = DBMaker
     .newDirectMemoryDB()
     .transactionDisable()
     .asyncFlushDelay(100)
     .make();

Map m = db.getTreeMap("test");

This records runs out of memory with 1 738 million records. Speed is just amazing 1.7 bilion items are inserted within 31 minutes.

MapDB can do even better. Lets increase b-tree node size from 32 to 120 entries and enable transparent compression:

   DB db = DBMaker
            .newDirectMemoryDB()
            .transactionDisable()
            .asyncFlushDelay(100)
            .compressionEnable()
            .make();

   Map m = db.createTreeMap("test",120, false, null, null, null);

This example runs out of memory at whipping 3 315 million records. It is slower thanks to compression, but it still finishes within a few hours. I could probably make some optimization (custom serializers etc) and push number of entries to somewhere around 4 billions.

Maybe you wander how all those entries can fit there. Answer is delta-key compression. Also inserting incremental key (already ordered) into B-Tree is best-case scenario and MapDB is slightly optimized for it. Worst case scenario is inserting keys at random order:

UPDATE added latter: there was bit confusion about compression. Delta-key compression is active by default on all examples. In this example I activated aditional zlib style compression.

    DB db = DBMaker
            .newDirectMemoryDB()
            .transactionDisable()
            .asyncFlushDelay(100)
            .make();

    Map m = db.getTreeMap("test");

    Random r = new Random();
    for(long counter=0;;counter++){
        m.put(r.nextLong(),"");
        if(counter%1000000==0) System.out.println(""+counter);
    }

But even with random order MapDB handles to store 651 million records, nearly 4 times more then heap-based collections.

This little excersice does not have much purpose. It is just one of many I do to optimize MapDB. Perhaps most amazing is that insertion speed was actually wery good and MapDB can compete with memory based collections.




Last modification: November 12 2012
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