Question

I have a web application working with sqlite database.
My version of sqlite is the latest from official windows binary distribution – 3.7.13.

The problem is that under heavy load on database, sqlite API functions (such as sqlite3_step) are returning SQLITE_BUSY.

I pass the following pragmas when initializing a connection:

journal_mode = WAL
page_size = 4096
synchronous = FULL
foreign_keys = on

The databas is one-file database. And I’m using Mono 2.10.8 and Mono.Data.Sqlite assembly provided with it to access database.

I’m testing it with 50 parallel threads which are sending 50 subsequent http-requests each to my application. On every request some reading and writing are done to the database. Every set of IO operations is executed inside the transaction.

Everything goes well until near 400th – 700th request. In this (random) moment API functions are starting to return SQLITE_BUSY permanently (To be more exact – until the limit of retries is reached).

As far as i know WAL mode transparently supports parallel reads and writes. I’ve guessed that it could be because of attempt to read database while checkpoint operation is executed. But even after turning autocheckpoint off the situation remains the same.

What could be wrong in this situation?
How to serve large amount of parallel database IO correctly?

P.S.

Only one connection per request is supposed.
I use nhibernate configured with WebSessionContext.

I initialize my NHibernate session like this:

ISession session = null;

//factory variable is session factory
if (CurrentSessionContext.HasBind(factory))
{
  session = factory.GetCurrentSession();
  if (session == null)
    CurrentSessionContext.Unbind(factory);
}

if (session == null)
{
  session = factory.OpenSession();
  CurrentSessionContext.Bind(session);
}

return session;

And on HttpApplication.EndRequest i release it like this:

//factory variable is session factory
if (CurrentSessionContext.HasBind(factory))
{
  try
  {
    CurrentSessionContext.Unbind(factory)
      .Dispose();
  }
  catch (Exception ee)
  {
    Logr.Error("Error uninitializing session", ee);
  }
}

So as far as i know there should be only one connection per request life cycle. While proceessing the request, code is executed sequentially (ASP.NET MVC 3). So it doesn’t look like any concurency is possible here. Can i conclude that no connections are shared in this case?

Answer 1

It’s not clear to me if the request threads share the same connection or not. If they don’t then you should not be having these issues.

Assuming that you are indeed sharing the connection object across multiple threads, you should use some locking mechanism as the the SqliteConnection isn’t thread-safe (an old post, but the SQLite library maintained as part of Mono evolved from System.Data.SQLite found on http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com).

So assuming that you don’t lock around using the SqliteConnection object, can you please try it? A simple way to accomplish this could look like this:

static readonly object _locker = new object();

public void ProcessRequest()
{
    lock (_locker) {
        using (IDbCommand dbcmd = conn.CreateCommand()) {
            string sql = "INSERT INTO foo VALUES ('bar')";
            dbcmd.CommandText = sql;
            dbcmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
        }
    }
}

You may however choose to open a distinct connection with each thread to ensure you don’t have any more threading issues with the SQLite library.

EDIT

Following-up on the code you posted, do you close the session after committing the transaction? If you don’t use some ITransaction, do you flush and close the session? I’m asking since I don’t see it in your code, and I see it mentioned in https://stackoverflow.com/a/43567/610650

I also see it mentioned on http://nhibernate.info/doc/nh/en/index.html#session-configuration:

Also note that you may call NHibernateHelper.GetCurrentSession(); as
many times as you like, you will always get the current ISession of
this HTTP request. You have to make sure the ISession is closed after
your unit-of-work completes, either in Application_EndRequest event
handler in your application class or in a HttpModule before the HTTP
response is sent.