Flushing RAM chunk to disk

FLUSH RTINDEX

FLUSH RTINDEX rtindex

FLUSH RTINDEX forcibly flushes RT index RAM chunk contents to disk.

Backing up an RT index is as simple as copying over its data files, followed by the binary log. However, recovering from that backup means that all the transactions in the log since the last successful RAM chunk write would need to be replayed. Those writes normally happen either on a clean shutdown, or periodically with a (big enough!) interval between writes specified in rt_flush_period directive. So such a backup made at an arbitrary point in time just might end up with way too much binary log data to replay.

FLUSH RTINDEX forcibly writes the RAM chunk contents to disk, and also causes the subsequent cleanup of (now redundant) binary log files. Thus, recovering from a backup made just after FLUSH RTINDEX should be almost instant.

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  • SQL
SQL
📋
FLUSH RTINDEX rt;
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Response
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)

Compacting an index

Over time, RT indexes can grow fragmented into many disk chunks and/or tainted with deleted, but unpurged data, impacting search performance. When that happens, they can be optimized. Basically, the optimization pass merges together disk chunks pairs, purging off documents suppressed by K-list as it goes.

OPTIMIZE INDEX

OPTIMIZE INDEX index_name [OPTION opt_name = opt_value [,...]]

OPTIMIZE statement enqueues an RT index for optimization in a background thread.

Number of optimized disk chunks

The optimize process reduces the disk chunks by default to a number equal with # of CPU cores * 2. The number of optimized disk chunks can be controlled with option cutoff.

In previous releases OPTIMIZE reduced the disk chunks to a single one. This can still be achieved if desired by setting OPTION cutoff=1.

Running in foreground

If OPTION sync=1 is used (0 by default), the command will wait until the optimization process is done (in case the connection interrupts the optimization will continue to run on the server).

Throttling the IO impact

Optimize can be a lengthy and IO intensive process, so to limit the impact, all the actual merge work is executed serially in a special background thread, and the OPTIMIZE statement simply adds a job to its queue. Currently, there is no way to check the index or queue status (that might be added in the future to the SHOW INDEX STATUS and SHOW STATUS statements respectively). The optimization thread can be IO-throttled, you can control the maximum number of IOs per second and the maximum IO size with rt_merge_iops and rt_merge_maxiosize directives respectively.

The RT index being optimized stays online and available for both searching and updates at (almost) all times during the optimization. It gets locked for a very short time when a pair of disk chunks is merged successfully, to rename the old and the new files, and update the index header.

At the moment, OPTIMIZE needs to be issued manually, the indexes are not optimized automatically. It will be changed in future releases.

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  • SQL
SQL
📋
OPTIMIZE INDEX rt;
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Response
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

FLUSH ATTRIBUTES

FLUSH ATTRIBUTES

Flushes all in-memory attribute updates in all the active disk indexes to disk. Returns a tag that identifies the result on-disk state (basically, a number of actual disk attribute saves performed since the server startup).

mysql> UPDATE testindex SET channel_id=1107025 WHERE id=1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.04 sec)

mysql> FLUSH ATTRIBUTES;
+------+
| tag  |
+------+
|    1 |
+------+
1 row in set (0.19 sec)