I’m using MongoDB on a 32 bit production system, which sucks but it’s out of my control right now. The challenge is to keep the memory usage under ~2.5GB since going over this will cause 32 bit systems to crash.
According to the mongoDB team, the best way to track the memory usage is to use your operating system’s process tracking system (i.e. ps or htop on Unix systems; Process Explorer on Windows.) for virtual memory size.
The DB mainly consists of one table which is continually cycling data, i.e. receiving data at regular intervals from sensors, and every day a cron job wipes all data from before the last 3 days. Over a period of time, the memory usage slowly increases. I took some notes over time using db.serverStats(), db.lectura.totalSize() and ps, shown in the chart below. Note that the size of the table in question has reduced in the last month but the memory usage increased nonetheless.
Now, there is some scope for adjustment in how many days of data I store. Today I deleted basically half of the data, and then restarted mongodb, and yet the mem virtual / mem mapped and most importantly memory usage according to ps have hardly changed! Why do these not reduce when I wipe data (and restart)? I read some other questions where people said that mongo isn’t really using all the memory that it might appear to be using, and that you can’t clear the cache or limit memory use. But then how can I ensure I stay under the 2.5GB limit?
Unless there is a way to stem this dataset-size-irrespective gradual increase in memory usage, it seems to me that the 32-bit version of Mongo is unuseable. Note: I don’t mind losing a bit of performance if it solves the problem.
To answer regarding why the mapped and virtual memory usage does not decrease with the deletes, the mapped number is actually what you get when you
mmap()the entire set of data files. This does not shrink when you delete records, because although the space is freed up inside the data files, they are not themselves reduced in size – the files are just more empty afterwards.Virtual will include journal files, and connections, and other non-data related memory usage also, but the same principle applies there. This, and more, is described here:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Checking+Server+Memory+Usage
So, the 2GB storage size limitation on 32-bit will actually apply to the data files whether or not there is data in them. To reclaim deleted space, you will have to run a repair. This is a blocking operation and will require the database to be offline/unavailable while it was run. It will also need up to 2x the original size in terms of free disk space to be able to run the repair, since it essentially represents writing out the files again from scratch.
This limitation, and the problems it causes, is why the 32-bit version should not be run in production, it is just not suitable. I would recommend getting onto a 64-bit version as soon as possible.
By the way, neither of these figures (mapped or virtual) actually represents your resident memory usage, which is what you really want to look at. The best way to do this over time is via MMS, which is the free monitoring service provided by 10gen – it will graph virtual, mapped and resident memory for you over time as well as plenty of other stats.
If you want an immediate view, run mongostat and check out the corresponding memory columns (res, mapped, virtual).
In general, when using 64-bit builds with essentially unlimited storage, the data will usually greatly exceed the available memory. Therefore, mongod will use all of the available memory it can in terms of resident memory (which is why you should always have swap configured to the OOM Killer does not come into play).
Once that is used, the OS does not stop allocating memory, it will just have the oldest items paged out to make room for the new data (LRU). In other words, the recycling of memory will be done for you, and the resident memory level will remain fairly constant.