Looking back at this series, I have the strong feeling that I’m being unfair to Resin, I’m judging it using the same criteria I would use to judge our own production, highly optimized code. The projects have very different goals, maturity and environments. That said, I think that a lot of the comments I have to the project are at the implementation level. That is, they can be fixed (except maybe the analyzer / tokenizer pipeline) by simply optimizing one method at a a time. Even the architectural change with analyzing the text isn’t very big. What is important is that the code is quite clear, easy to follow and have a well defined structure. That means that it is actually possible to make this changes as the project mature.

And now that this is out of the way, let me cover some of the things that I would have done differently in the codebase. A lot of them are around I/O related. In particular, the usage of all those different files and the way this is done is decidedly non optimal. In particular, opening and closing of the files constantly, reading and seeking all over the place, etc. The actual design seems to be based around LSM, even if this isn’t state explicitly. And that have pretty good semantics already for writes, but reads currently are probably leaning very heavily on the file system cache, but that won’t work as the data grows beyond a certain scope.

When running on a Unix system, you also need to consider the fact that there is a limit to the number of open files you have, so smaller number of files are generally preferred. I would go with merging all those files into a single large one, similar to the compound format that Lucene uses.

Once that is done, I would also memory map the entire file to memory and use directly memory accesses to handle all I/O. This has several very important advantages. First, I’m being a lot more explicit about using the file system cache, and that would allow us to avoid a lot of system calls. Second, the data is already mostly structured as arrays, so it would be very natural to do so. This also avoid the need to manually buffer things in our own memory, which is always nice.

Next, there is the need to consider consistency checks. Resin as it stands now (I’m not sure if this is an explicit design decision) takes the position that it is not its job to ensure file consistency. Lucene make some attempt to ensure consistency, and usually fails at that horribly at the most inconvenient moments. Adding a hash to the file will allow to ensure that the data is okay, but it means  having to read the entire file when you open it, which is probably too expensive.

The other aspect that need attention is the data structure used. In particular LcrsTrie is a good idea to save space and might work well for in memory usage, but it isn’t a good choice for persistent data structures. B+Tree or SST are the common choices, and need to be evaluated for the job.

As part of this, and quite important, I would recommend getting a look at the full I/O status. That means:

• How you write to disk?
• How you update data?
• Do you have write amplification (merges)?
• Are you trying for consistency / ACID?
• Can you explain how your data is persisted, using algorithms / approaches that are well known and trusted?

The latter is good both for external users (who can then reason about your system) and for yourself. If you are using LSM, you know that you have a set of problems (compactions, write amplifications) and solutions (auto optimize over time, etc) that is well known and you can make use of that. If you are using B+Trees, then the problems and solutions space are different, but there is even more information about them.

If you are using consistency, are you using WAL or append only? What are your consistency guarantees, etc?

Those are all questions that needs answers, and they have an impact on the design of the project as a whole.

And with this, this series is over. I have to say that I didn’t think that I would have so much to write about. It is a very interesting project.

In the previous part, I looked at how indexing and queries are handled in Resin. This post is mostly about the pieces I haven’t talked about so far. We’ll start with the query parser and move to the trie.

Queries in Resin looks like this:

This is sort of looking like the Lucene syntax, but it looks like it keeps the same context until a new field comes along.

Range queries looks better, sort of:

I had a hard time figuring this one out, until I realized that this is not an XML tag in the middle.

The problem is that the Lucene query syntax kinda sucks. Actually, it sucks a lot. It is complex and ambiguous to parse and it is full of all those little things like the ~ over there that is not very obvious but is very important to the query. I would actually suggest something more like SQL. Sure, that wouldn’t be what you’ll put in the search box, but programmers will appreciate you for that.

Looking at the parser code, there aren’t any surprises there. It is using a hard rolled system using regex and split, which can be vastly improved. One thing to note is that because of the simplicity of the parser, it isn’t really able to process things like a search for a token with a colon in it, so it can’t process this query: 

url:http://ayende.com

Anyway, the query parser isn’t really the most important thing here. The core of Resin, and what I haven’t looked at so far at all is the trie…

LcrsTrie stands for Left child Right sibling, there is a good discussion on the reasons why you’ll want to use this here. At this point, I’m not really sure why the choice of Lcrs was used. In general, they are used to reduce space and simplify the representation, but I don’t think that this is a good idea for a persistent structure. I’ll look at that later. Right now I’m reading the code, and it is mostly pretty obvious code. But then you get to this:

This pattern of using IEnumerable to return a single value is something that I’ve seen in other places in the codebase, and I don’t really get it.

I like the use of the Levenshtein distance in fuzzy search, mostly because we don’t need to store a lot of data to get fuzzy search working. In particular, it looks like suggestion style queries are pretty easy, and would be much cheaper then it would be in Lucene.

Probably the core operation you always perform on a trie is the search, and the core of that in this case is the TryFindPath method:

There is nothing surprising in this code, but it is a pure in memory implementation, which is a very different environment then a persistent data structure.

The persistent data structure is actually the MappedTrieReader, so let us examine it. Looking at it, there is some reference to the notions of segments within the file, but I’m not seeing where it is used. This is what the “*.six” file is used for, it seems. I think that this might be related to merging, but I don’t really know.

And here is the reason for the IsWord design:

When using a single LcrsTrie, it isn’t needed. But when using a possibly segmented reader, we might have multiple results for the same word.

What is worrying here is that the same access pattern for the trie that is used in memory is also using in the persistent mode. That means that each time we need to traverse the trie, we’ll need to seek. Actually, it looks like that might only be needed when we aren’t on the right path, but that is actually pretty common, so there are going to be a lot of seeks.

That is enough for now, my next post will be more detailed analysis of the Resin I/O structure and what I would probably do instead.

In the previous part, I looked at UpsertTransaction in Resin and speculated about how the queries work. In this one, I’m going to try to figure out how queries work. Our starting point is this:

We start from the index header, and we’ll traverse down from there. One one the first things that happen in the Collector is the creation of the DocHashReader, whose sole purpose is to… read a document hash. It is doing it like this:

The problem is that there is really no need to write all this code. It would be simple to use:

It does the exact same thing, but with a lot less work all around.

The core of the Collect method is:

For our purposes, we are running just a single query, so no need to worry about sub queries at this time. Looking at the Scan method, the first thing it does is to open the tri file. It looks like I missed a bunch of stuff there.

The field name hash is the one used in the key, not the name itself. That means that you aren’t limited to just stuff that is safe to use on the file system. There is also a “.six” file that I’ve not seen before, it is related to tries, and I’m skipping it for now because I want to have a separate post about them.

It is used like this:

The problem I have is that this means that the GetTreeReader will open a bunch of files, then immediately close them. That is going to be a lot of system calls that are being generated, which can probably be saved with some effort.

The really interesting bit is here:

This is where the magic happens. This is the core for actually searching over the tries and figuring out what values we actually have there.

The result of this is a List<(string Field, Word Word)>. And Word contains:

Reminder, the Postings is actually the list of all the documents that contain this value in this field, and the number of times that this value appear in the document.

The next method is GetPostings, which starts by reading them:

The problem I have here is that this method looks like it has been refactored half way. It can only return a single list, and again, there is the over use of Linq operations and their allocations.

As an aside on code formatting, in many places in the code so far, I have chosen to minify the code without changing its meaning, because there is such a high overhead to the differences. I’m doing this fairly automatically, because it help me read and understand. Here is a before and after example, which was drastic enough to make me realize I’m doing this.

Before	After

Functionally, those two are doing the same, and I fine the after option much more readable.

The Sum method here is pretty horrible, in the sense that it has high complexity, luckily, it is never called with more then one list, so that cost is hidden.

A fun exercise would be to compute the actual complexity with real inputs. I just looked at it and went “this gotta be expensive” then figured out that the code only ever call it with a single list, so I skipped it.

After getting the posting, we need to score the query. This is where we see the usage of the document hash. They are used to go from the document id to check if the document has been deleted. The actual scoring is Tf-Idf, so pretty standard and not interesting here.

It does bugs me to see things like this:

Sorting can be very expensive, and I’m pretty sure that it is not actually needed here, and it would improve performance quite impressively to remove it.

Okay, now we are almost done with the query, all that remains is investigating this line:

The unbounded result set is annoying, but I gave up that fight, I’m afraid. Let us see what Reduce does. In complex queries, I expect that it would merge all the subqueries and do filtering / intersection/etc.

And it does just that, which is great. I do wonder if scoring the results could be pushed after the query reducing, because that would reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, but that is a small optimizations, probably.

Okay, that is enough for this post. I now have a pretty good understanding on how queries actually work. Next, I’m going to look at some other pieces of the code that I haven’t looked at, then focus of the trie.

In the previous part, I started looking at UpsertTransacction, but got sidetracked into the utils functions. Let us focus back on this. The key parts of UpsertRansaction are:

Let us see what they are. The DocumentStream is the source of the documents that will be written in this transaction, its job is to get the documents to be indexed, to give them a unique id if they don’t already have one and hash them.

I’m not sure yet what is the point there, but we have this:

Which sounds bad. The likelihood is small, but it isn’t a crypto hash, so likely very easily broken. For example, look at what happened to MurmurHash.

I think that this is later used to handle some partitioning in the trie, but I’m not sure yet. We’ll look at the _storeWriter later. Let us see what the UpsertTransaction does. It builds a trie, then push each of the document from the stream to through the trie. The code is doing a lot of allocations, but I’m going to stop harping at that from now on.

The trie is called for each term for each document with the following information:

The code isn’t actually using tuple, I just collapsed a few classes to make it clear what the input is.

This is what will eventually allow the trie to do lookups on a term and find the matching document, I’m assuming.

That method is going to start a new task for that particular field name, if it is new, and push the new list of words for that field into the work queue for that task. The bad thing here is that we are talking about a blocking task, so if you have a lot of fields, you are going to spawn off a lot of threads, one per field name.

What I know now is that we are going to have a trie per field, and it is likely, based on the design decisions made so far, that a trie isn’t a small thing.

Next, the UpsertTransaction need to write the document, this is done taking the document we are processing and turning that into a dictionary of short to string. I’m not sure how it is supposed to handle multiple values for the same field, but I’ll ignore that for now. That dictionary is then saved into a file and its length and positions are returned.

I know that I said that I won’t talk about performance, but I looked at the serialization code and I saw that it is using compression, like this. This is done on a field by field basis, while you could probably benefit from compressing them all together.

Those are a lot of allocations, and then we go a bit deeper:

First, we have the allocation of the memory stream, then the ToArray call, and that happens, per field, per document. Actually, if we go up, we’ll see:

So it is allocations all the way down.

Okay, let us focus on what is going on in terms of files:

• "write.lock" – this one is pretty obvious
• *.da – stands for document address. Holds a series of (long Position, int Size) of document addresses. I assume that this is using the same sort as something else, not sure yet. The fact that this is fixed size means that we can easily skip into it.
• *.rdoc – documents are stored here. Contains the actual serialized data for the documents (the Dictionary<short, Field>), this is the target for the addresses that are held by the “*.da” files.
• *.pk – holds document hashes. Holds a list of document pk hash and a flag saying if it is deleted, I’m assuming. From context, it looks like the hash is a way to update documents across transactions.
• *.kix – key index. Text file holding the names of all the fields across the entire transaction.
• *.pos – posting file. This one holds the tries that were built during the transaction. This is basically just List<(int DocumentId, int Count)>, but I’m not sure how they are used just yet. It looks like this is how Resin is able to get the total term frequency per document. It looks like this is also sorted.
• *.tri – the trie files that actually contain the specific values for a particular field. The name pattern is “{indexVersion}-{fieldName}.tri”. That means that your field names are limited to valid file names, by the way.

The last part of the UpsertTransaction is the commit, which essentially boil down to this:

I think that this was very insightful read, I have a much better understanding of how Resin actually work. I’m going to speculate wildly, and then use my next post to check further into that.

Let us say that we want to search for all users who live in New York City. We can do that by opening the “636348272149533175-City.tri” file. The 636348272149533175 is the index version, by the way.

Using the trie, we search for the value of New York City. The trie value actually give us a (long Position, int Size) into the 636348272149533175.pos file, which holds the posting. Basically, we now have an array of (int DocumentId, int Count) of the documents that matched that particular value.

If we want to retrieve those documents, we can use the 636348272149533175.da file, which holds the addresses of the documents. Again, this is effectively an array of (long Position, int Size) that we can index into using the DocumentId. This points to the location on the 636348272149533175.rdoc file, which holds the actual document data.

I’m not sure yet what the point of *.pa and *.kix is, but I’m sure the next post we’ll figure it out.

In the first pat of this series, I looked into how Resin is tokenizing and analyzing text. I’m still reading the code from the tests (this is because the Tests folder sorted higher then the Resin folder, basically) and I now moved to the second file, CollectorTests.

That one has a really interesting start:

There are a lot of really interesting things here, UpsertTransaction, document structure, issuing queries, etc. UpsertTransaction is a good place to start looking around, so let us poke in. When looking at it, we can se a lot of usage in the Utils class, so I’ll look at that first.

This is probably a bad idea. While using the current time ticks seems like it would generate ever increasing values, that is actually not the case, certainly not with local time (clock shift, daylight saving, etc). Using that for the purpose of generating a file id is probably a mistake. It is better to use our own counter, and just keep track of the last one we used on the file system itself.

Then we have this:

It took me a while to figure out what was going on there, and then more to frantically search where this is used. Basically, this is used in fuzzy searches, and it will allocate a new instance of the string on each call. Given that fuzzy search is popular in full text search usage, and that this is called a lot during any such search, this is going to allocate like crazy. It would be better to move the entire thing to using mutable buffers, instead of passing strings around.

Then we go to the locking, and I had to run it a few times to realize what is going on.

And this isn’t the way to do this at all. Basically, this relies on the file system to fail when you are trying to copy a file into an already existing file. However, that is a really bad way to go about doing that. The OS and the file system already have locking primitives that you can use, and they are going to be much better then this option. For example, consider what happens after a crash, is the directory locked or not? There is no real way to answer that, since the process might have crashed, leaving the file in place, or it might be doing things, expected that this is locked.

Moving on, we have this simple looking method:

I know I’m harping on that, but this method is doing a lot of allocations by using lambdas, and depending on the number of files, the delegate indirection can be quite costly.  For that matter, there is also the issue of error handling. If there is a lock file in this directory when this is called, this will throw.

Our final code for this post is:

I really don’t like this code, it is something that look like it is cheap, but it will:

• Sort all the index files in the folder
• Open all of them
• Read some data
• Sum over that data

Leaving aside that the deserialization code has the typical issue of not checking that the the entire buffer was read, this can cause a lot of I/O on the system, but luckily this function is never called.

Okay, so we didn’t actually get to figure out what UpsertTransaction is, we’ll look at that in the next post.

Resin is a “Cross-platform document database and search engine with query language, API and CLI”. It is written in C#, and while I admit that reading C# code isn’t as challenging as diving into a new language, a project that has a completely new approach to a subject that is near and dear to my heart is always welcome.  It is also small, coming at about 6,500 lines of code, so that make for quick reading.

I’m reviewing commit ddbffff88995226fa52236f6dd6af4a48c833f7a.

As usual, I’m going to start reading the code in alphabetical file order, and then jump around as it make sense. The very first file I run into is Tests/AnalyzerTests where we find the following:

This is really interesting, primarily because of what it tells me. Analyzers are pretty much only used for full text search, such as Lucene or Noise. Jumping into the analyzer, we see:

This tell me quite a few things. To start with, this is a young project. The first commit is less then 18 months ago and I’m judging it with the same eye I use to looking at our own code. This code needs to be improved, for several reasons.

First, we have a virtual method call here, probably intended to be an extension point down the line. Currently, it isn’t used, and we pay the virtual call cost for no reason. Next we have the return value. IEnumerable is great, but this method is using yield, which means that we’ll have a new instance created per document. For the same reason, the tokenDic is also problematic. This one is created per field’s value, which is going to cost.

One of the first thing you want to have when you start worrying about performance is controlling your allocations. Reducing allocations in this case, by reusing the dictionary instance, or avoiding the yield would help. Lucene did a lot of stuff right in that regard, and it ensures that you can reuse instances wherever possible (almost always), since that can dramatically improve performance.

Other than this, we can also see that we have Analyze and Index features, for now I’m going to assume that they are identical to Lucene until proven otherwise. This was the analyzer, but what is going on with the tokenizer? Usually that is a lot more low level.

The core of the tokenizer is this method (I prettified it a bit to make it fit better on screen):

As far as I can tell so far, most of the effort in the codebase has gone into the data structures used, not to police allocations or get absolute performance. However, even so this would be one of the first places I would look at whenever performance work would start. (To be fair, speaking with the author of this code, I know there hasn’t been any profiling / benchmarking on the code).

This code is going to be at the heart of any indexing, and for each value, it is going to:

• Allocate another string with the lowered case value.
• Allocate a character buffer of the same size as the string.
• Process that character buffer.
• Allocate another string from that buffer.
• Split that string.
• Use a lambda on each of the parts and evaluate that against the stopwords.

That is going to have a huge amount of allocations / computation that can be saved. Without changing anything external to this function, we can write the following:

This will do the same, but at a greatly reduced allocation cost. A better alternative here would be to change the design. Instead of having to allocate a new list, send a buffer and don’t deal with strings directly, instead, deal with a spans. Until we .NET Core 2.0 is out, I’m going to skip spans and just use direct tokens, like so:

There are a few important things here. First, the code now don’t do any string allocations, instead, it is operating on the string characters directly. We have the IsStopword method that is now more complex, because it needs to do the check without allocating a string and while being efficient about it. How it left as an exercise for the reader, but it shouldn’t be too hard.

One thing that might not be obvious is that tokens list that we get as an argument. The idea here is that the caller code can reuse this list (and memory) between calls, but that would require a major change in the code.

In general, not operating on strings at all would be a great thing indeed. We can work with direct character buffers, which will allow us to be mutable. Again, spans would probably fit right into this and be of great help.

That is enough for now, I know we just started, but I’ll continue this in the next post.