Expand TieredMergePolicy deletePctAllowed limits

[mdmarshmallow]

Description

I'm an engineer at Amazon Search and we have been experimenting with more aggressively getting rid of deleted documents. We use TieredMergePolicy and we would like to set TieredMergePolicy#deletesPctAllowed to be lower than the current limit of 20%.

I was wondering why this limit was set in place. I'm sure I could be missing some context here. Maybe we could keep the limits in place but allow users to explicitly remove the checks? Any information would be much appreciated, thanks!

[jpountz]

Historically this was not configurable and Lucene would allow up to 50% deleted documents. When we introduced an option, we made sure to introduce a lower bound on the value because a value of zero would essentially require Lucene to rewrite every segment that has a deletion after every update operation, which is certainly undesirable. Allowing users to go from 50% to 20% felt like a significant improvement already.

We could discuss lowering the limit if we feel like this could lead to merging patterns that are still acceptable. E.g. I used BaseMergePolicyTestCase#doTestSimulateUpdates in the past to get a sense of how this option would influence write amplification.

[mdmarshmallow]

Hi, thanks for the response! Your explanation of 0% not being allowed makes complete sense. For some context though, using our own forked version of TieredMergePolicy, we have tested with down to 2% allowable deletion and still see that behavior is desirable for us (more specifically much lower index sizes than at 20% deletes).

Maybe if we want to maintain those limits, we could create a setDeletesPctAllowedUnsafe() or something like that which has no limits on it (or at least drops the lower bound to being > 0 instead of > 20)?

[jpountz]

I got some numbers for write amplification for the case tested in TestTieredMergePolicy#testSimulateUpdates:

Allowed percentage of deletes	Write amplification
50 (max)	4.34
33 (default)	4.34
20 (min)	4.68
10	6.13
5	8.76
4	10.31
3	12.97
2	18.76
1	37.89
0	10779.78

Assuming these numbers are representative, maybe we could allow users to configure 5% as the allowed percentage of deletes that their indexes may have, which translates to ~2x more write amplification compared to the default of 33% according to the above numbers.

For reference, the algorithm that TieredMergePolicy uses to keep the number of deletes under the threshold consists of running the most balanced merge (with a small bias towards merges that reclaim more deletes) until the number of deletes of the index is under the threshold.

[mdmarshmallow]

Thanks for taking the time to look into this! I think 5% would be a good start, it would be near the threshold we want to test (we were thinking 2% but looking at your initial write amplification numbers, this may not be a great idea). I'm also planning on making an issue to create a FilterDirectory that tracks the write amplification factor. This should let us (Amazon Search) get some write amplification numbers that I can hopefully share here as well.

[mdmarshmallow]

Here is the issue I created with a PR attached in case you were interested: #11795

[dan2097]

I have also ran into this on our patent search system. In our index the problem is exagerrated by the larger documents tending to be more frequently reindexed so the 20% deleted documents can translate to 40% of the overall index size!
For my use case 5% would be a massive improvement.

I ccan definitely imagine that for a system where indexing is light and infrequent 2% may make sense to ensure optimal perfomance/disk usage, without requiring the explicit use expungeDeletes. Having said that 5% is definitely low enough for my use case.

[uschindler]

I was also doing consulting for an huge Elasticsearch user and they also had this problem of keeping deletes as low as possible and the 20% limit was way too high. 20% looks like an arbitrary limitation.

[jpountz]

If someone opens a PR to decrease the limit from 20% to 5% I'll happily approve the change given the results I shared above.

[mdmarshmallow]

Here is a PR: #11831

[rmuir]

I got some numbers for write amplification for the case tested in TestTieredMergePolicy#testSimulateUpdates:

@jpountz based on these numbers wouldn't it also make sense to consider changing the default from 33% to 20% as well? Just an idea.

[mdmarshmallow]

I can include that in the above PR as well if you all agree that it's a good idea.

[dan2097]

I can include that in the above PR as well if you all agree that it's a good idea.

I think it's probably a good idea. Faster search performance (due to the indexes having fewer deleted documents) and a reduced risk of underestimating space requirements and running out of disk space seem a reasonable tradeoff for a small increase in indexing time.

[jpountz]

+1 to update the default from 33 to 20.

[uschindler]

+1 to update the default from 33 to 20.

[mdmarshmallow]

I updated the PR to change the default as well.

[jpountz]

Closing: #11831 has been merged.