Increase Block Write Size form 128K to 256K

Operations Tuning
1

What is the Impact on storage size usage if i try to increase the block size from 128K to 256K?

Is it mean twice storage size usage? or there’s no impact?

Thanks, Avi

2

Aerospike writes in blocks sized by the write-block-size parameter. Depending on your SSDs, you may find that increasing the write-block-size may enhance, degrade, or not change the write performance of your system. The write-block-size setting also limits the maximum size of a record stored in Aerospike. Currently the max at which you may set write-block-size is 1 MB.

On older generation SSDs, we found that we achieved higher performance with a write-block-size set to 128KB; however, with modern SSDs, we have seen that we often achieve higher performance at the 1MB limit.

3

I have my Aerospike server in a GCP machine. I had problems with the message “device overload”. It was solved by setting write-block-size to a 1 MB. Nice response @kporter. Thanks

4

The information here is a bit stale, the maximum value for write-block-size was increased to 8 MiB in Aerospike Server 3.16 (IIRC).

5

Got it. The only question is, the higher the write-block-size is, the better performance is? or can this only be confirmed by testing different values? @kporter

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Depends on manufacturer and drive specs… as well as your own use case. YMMV. Need to test and compare. Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark…

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The write-block-size also sets the maximum allowed record size. Often users are surprised to see that their network utilization increases when they increase the write-block-size since they have now permitted their records to grow further. In Aerospike 5.7, we introduced the max-record-size configuration parameter - you can now increase your write-block-size independently of your max-record-size.

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Don’t forget that increasing the write-block-size would also increase the post-write-queue and that may be what is helping with performance. Going from 128KiB to 1MiB means an 8x larger post-write-queue.

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