Merge pull request #233549 from TheovanKraay/cassandra-mi-best-practice-perf

best practices for perf guide

Author: JamesJBarnett

articles/managed-instance-apache-cassandra/TOC.yml

@@ -38,6 +38,8 @@
       href: faq.md  
 - name: How-to guides
   items: 
+    - name: Best practices for optimal performance
+      href: best-practice-performance.md   
     - name: Add service principal for deployment
       href: add-service-principal.md 
     - name: Configure Customer-Managed Keys

articles/managed-instance-apache-cassandra/best-practice-performance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,232 @@
+---
+title: Best practices for optimal performance in Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra
+description: Learn about best practices to ensure optimal performance from Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra
+author: TheovanKraay
+ms.service: managed-instance-apache-cassandra
+ms.topic: how-to
+ms.date: 04/05/2023
+ms.author: thvankra
+keywords: azure performance cassandra
+---
+
+# Best practices for optimal performance
+
+Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra provides automated deployment and scaling operations for managed open-source Apache Cassandra datacenters. This article provides tips on how to optimize performance.
+
+
+## Optimal setup and configuration
+
+### Replication factor, number of disks, number of nodes, and SKUs
+
+Because Azure supports *three* availability zones in most regions, and Cassandra Managed Instance maps availability zones to racks, we recommend choosing a partition key with high cardinality to avoid hot partitions. For the best level of reliability and fault tolerance, we highly recommend configuring a replication factor of 3. We also recommend specifying a multiple of the replication factor as the number of nodes, for example 3, 6, 9, etc. 
+
+
+We use a RAID 0 over the number of disks you provision. So to get the optimal IOPS you need to check for the maximum IOPS on the SKU you have chosen together with the IOPS of a P30 disk. For example, the `Standard_DS14_v2` SKU supports 51,200 uncached IOPS, whereas a single P30 disk has a base performance of 5,000 IOPS. So, four disks would lead to 20,000 IOPS, which is well below the limits of the machine.
+
+We strongly recommend extensive benchmarking of your workload against the SKU and number of disks. Benchmarking is especially important in the case of SKUs with only eight cores. Our research shows that eight core CPUs only work for the least demanding workloads, and most workloads need a minimum of 16 cores to be performant.
+
+
+## Analytical vs. Transactional workloads
+
+Transactional workloads typically need a data center optimized for low latency, while analytical workloads often use more complex queries, which take longer to execute. In most cases you would want separate data centers:
+
+* One optimized for low latency
+* One optimized for analytical workloads
+
+
+### Optimizing for analytical workloads
+
+We recommend customers apply the following `cassandra.yaml` settings for analytical workloads (see [here](create-cluster-portal.md#update-cassandra-configuration) on how to apply)
+
+
+
+#### Timeouts
+
+
+|Value                             |Cassandra MI Default    |Recommendation for analytical workload |
+|----------------------------------|------------------------|---------------------------------------|
+|read_request_timeout_in_ms        |    5,000               |   10,000  |
+|range_request_timeout_in_ms       |10,000                  |20,000 |
+|counter_write_request_timeout_in_ms |  5,000               | 10,000 |
+|cas_contention_timeout_in_ms      |1,000                   |2,000 |
+|truncate_request_timeout_in_ms    |60,000                  |120,000|
+|slow_query_log_timeout_in_ms      |500                     |1,000 |
+|roles_validity_in_ms              |2,000                   |120,000 |
+|permissions_validity_in_ms        |2,000                   |120,000 |
+
+
+#### Caches
+
+|Value                             |Cassandra MI Default    |Recommendation for analytical workload |
+|----------------------------------|------------------------|---------------------------------------|
+| file_cache_size_in_mb            | 2,048                  |6,144 |
+
+
+#### More recommendations
+
+|Value                             |Cassandra MI Default    |Recommendation for analytical workload |
+|----------------------------------|------------------------|---------------------------------------|
+|commitlog_total_space_in_mb       |8,192                   |16,384 |
+|column_index_size_in_kb           |64                      |16 |
+|compaction_throughput_mb_per_sec  |128                     |256 |
+
+
+#### Client settings
+
+We recommend boosting Cassandra client driver timeouts in accordance with the timeouts applied on the server.
+
+
+### Optimizing for low latency
+
+Our default settings are already suitable for low latency workloads. To ensure best performance for tail latencies we highly recommend using a client driver that supports [speculative execution](https://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/4.10/manual/core/speculative_execution/) and configuring your client accordingly. For Java V4 driver, you can find a demo illustrating how this works and how to enable the policy [here](https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-cassandra-mi-java-v4-speculative-execution).
+
+
+
+
+## Monitoring for performance bottle necks
+
+
+### CPU performance
+
+Like every database system, Cassandra works best if the CPU utilization is around 50% and never gets above 80%. You can view CPU metrics in the Metrics tab within Monitoring from the portal:
+
+   :::image type="content" source="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics.png" alt-text="Screenshot of CPU metrics." lightbox="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics.png" border="true"::: 
+
+
+If the CPU is permanently above 80% for most nodes the database will become overloaded manifesting in multiple client timeouts. In this scenario, we recommend taking the following actions:
+
+* vertically scale up to a SKU with more CPU cores (especially if the cores are only 8 or less).
+* horizontally scale by adding more nodes (as mentioned earlier, the number of nodes should be multiple of the replication factor).
+
+
+If the CPU is only high for a few nodes, but low for the others, it indicates a hot partition and needs further investigation.
+
+
+> [!NOTE]
+> Currently changing SKU is only supported via ARM template deployment. You can deploy/edit ARM template, and replace SKU with one of the following.
+>
+> - Standard_E8s_v4
+> - Standard_E16s_v4
+> - Standard_E20s_v4
+> - Standard_E32s_v4
+> - Standard_DS13_v2
+> - Standard_DS14_v2
+> - Standard_D8s_v4
+> - Standard_D16s_v4
+> - Standard_D32s_v4
+
+
+
+### Disk performance
+
+The service runs on Azure P30 managed disks, which allow for "burst IOPS". Careful monitoring is required when it comes to disk related performance bottlenecks. In this case it's important to review the IOPS metrics:
+
+   :::image type="content" source="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-disk.png" alt-text="Screenshot of disk I/O metrics." lightbox="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-disk.png" border="true"::: 
+
+If metrics show one or all of the following characteristics, it can indicate that you need to scale up.
+
+- Consistently higher than or equal to the base IOPS (remember to multiply 5,000 IOPS by the number of disks per node to get the number).
+- Consistently higher than or equal to the maximum IOPS allowed for the SKU for writes.
+- Your SKU supports cached storage (write-through-cache) and this number is smaller than the IOPS from the managed disks (this will be the upper limit for your read IOPS).
+
+If you only see the IOPS elevated for a few nodes, you might have a hot partition and need to review your data for a potential skew.
+
+If your IOPS are lower than what is supported by the chosen SKU, but higher or equal to the disk IOPS, you can take the following actions:
+
+* Add more disks to increase performance. Increasing disks requires a support case to be raised.
+* [Scale up the data center(s)](create-cluster-portal.md#scale-a-datacenter) by adding more nodes.
+
+
+If your IOPS max out what your SKU supports, you can:
+
+* scale up to a different SKU supporting more IOPS.
+* [Scale up the data center(s)](create-cluster-portal.md#scale-a-datacenter) by adding more nodes.
+
+
+For more information refer to [Virtual Machine and disk performance](../virtual-machines/disks-performance.md).
+
+### Network performance
+
+In most cases network performance is sufficient. However, if you are frequently streaming data (such as frequent horizontal scale-up/scale down) or there are huge ingress/egress data movements, this can become a problem. You may need to evaluate the network performance of your SKU. For example, the `Standard_DS14_v2` SKU supports 12,000 Mb/s, compare this to the byte-in/out in the metrics:
+
+
+   :::image type="content" source="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-network.png" alt-text="Screenshot of network metrics." lightbox="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-network.png" border="true"::: 
+
+
+If you only see the network elevated for a small number of nodes, you might have a hot partition and need to review your data distribution and/or access patterns for a potential skew.
+
+* Vertically scale up to a different SKU supporting more network I/O.
+* Horizontally scale up the cluster by adding more nodes.
+
+
+
+### Too many connected clients
+
+Deployments should be planned and provisioned to support the maximum number of parallel requests required for the desired latency of an application. For a given deployment, introducing more load to the system above a minimum threshold increases overall latency. Monitor the number of connected clients to ensure this does not exceed tolerable limits. 
+
+   :::image type="content" source="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-connections.png" alt-text="Screenshot of connected client metrics." lightbox="./media/best-practice-performance/metrics-connections.png" border="true"::: 
+
+
+### Disk space
+
+In most cases, there is sufficient disk space as default deployments are optimized for IOPS, which leads to low utilization of the disk. Nevertheless, we advise occasionally reviewing disk space metrics. Cassandra accumulates a lot of disk and then reduces it when compaction is triggered. Hence it is important to review disk usage over longer periods to establish trends - like compaction unable to recoup space.
+
+> [!NOTE]
+> In order to ensure available space for compaction, disk utilization should be kept to around 50%.
+
+If you only see this behavior for a few nodes, you might have a hot partition and need to review your data distribution and/or access patterns for a potential skew.
+
+
+* add more disks but be mindful of IOPS limits imposed by your SKU
+* horizontally scale up the cluster
+
+
+
+### JVM memory
+
+Our default formula assigns half the VM's memory to the JVM with an upper limit of 31 GB - which in most cases is a good balance between performance and memory. Some workloads, especially ones which have frequent cross-partition reads or range scans might be memory challenged.
+
+In most cases memory gets reclaimed effectively by the Java garbage collector, but especially if the CPU is often above 80% there aren't enough CPU cycles for the garbage collector left. So any CPU performance problems should be addresses before memory problems.
+
+If the CPU hovers below 70%, and the garbage collection isn't able to reclaim memory, you might need more JVM memory. This is especially the case if you are on a SKU with limited memory. In most cases, you will need to review your queries and client settings and reduce `fetch_size` along with what is chosen in `limit` within your CQL query.
+
+If you indeed need more memory, you can:
+
+* File a ticket for us to increase the JVM memory settings for you
+* Scale vertically to a SKU that has more memory available
+
+
+### Tombstones
+
+We run repairs every seven days with reaper which removes rows whose TTL has expired (called "tombstone"). Some workloads have more frequent deletes and see warnings like `Read 96 live rows and 5035 tombstone cells for query SELECT ...; token <token> (see tombstone_warn_threshold)` in the Cassandra logs, or even errors indicating that a query couldn't be fulfilled due to excessive tombstones.
+
+A short term mitigation if queries don't get fulfilled is to increase the `tombstone_failure_threshold` in the [Cassandra config](create-cluster-portal.md#update-cassandra-configuration) from the default 100,000 to a higher value. 
+
+
+In addition to this, we recommend reviewing the TTL on the keyspace and potentially run repairs daily to clear out more tombstones. If the TTLs are short, for example less than two days, and data flows in and gets deleted quickly, we recommend reviewing the [compaction strategy](https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/4.1/cassandra/operating/compaction/index.html#types-of-compaction) and favoring `Leveled Compaction Strategy`. In some cases, such actions may be an indication that a review of the data model is required.
+
+### Batch warnings
+
+You might encounter this warning in the [CassandraLogs](monitor-clusters.md#create-setting-portal) and potentially related failures:
+
+`Batch for [<table>] is of size 6.740KiB, exceeding specified threshold of 5.000KiB by 1.740KiB.`
+
+In this case you should review your queries to stay below the recommended batch size. In rare cases and as a short term mitigation you can increase `batch_size_fail_threshold_in_kb` in the [Cassandra config](create-cluster-portal.md#update-cassandra-configuration) from the default of 50 to a higher value.  
+
+
+
+
+## Large partition warning
+
+You might encounter this warning in the [CassandraLogs](monitor-clusters.md#create-setting-portal):
+
+`Writing large partition <table> (105.426MiB) to sstable <file>`
+
+This indicates a problem in the data model. Here is a [stack overflow article](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74024443/how-do-i-analyse-and-solve-writing-large-partition-warnings-in-cassandra) that goes into more detail. This can cause severe performance issues and needs to be addressed.
+
+## Next steps
+
+In this article, we laid out some best practices for optimal performance. You can now start working with the cluster:
+
+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]
+> [Create a cluster using Azure Portal](create-cluster-portal.md)

articles/managed-instance-apache-cassandra/index.yml

@@ -65,6 +65,8 @@ landingContent:
             url: configure-hybrid-cluster.md               
       - linkListType: how-to-guide
         links: 
+          - text: Best practices for optimal performance
+            url: best-practice-performance.md   
           - text: Manage resources with Azure CLI
             url: manage-resources-cli.md   
           - text: Enable LDAP Authentication