Do people have good experiences with LMDB, in terms of reliability? I've never used it in production, but I've read through the code and design documents for a database implementation class.
I remember some strange code (such as pushing return values 4k above the stack, with a comment like "this works as long as the caller doesn't use more than 4k of stack space before accessing the return value"), and the author also shared some unconventional opinions about undefined behavior (like "Compilers are deterministic, if I know what platform I'm compiling to then no behavior is undefined. And if compiler authors disagree, they are morons.")
But presumably it's thoroughly tested, so those aren't problems in practice? Would be really interested to hear from people who've actually used it. I've mainly stuck to SQLite instead.
Not amazing. In certain workloads I ran, once the db reached several hundred gb, writes would hang for longer and longer periods of time, eventually hours, while the db grew drastically in the background. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023623 seems to be the same issue, and it was serious enough that Shopify decided not to use lmdb.
And yes, I ensured there were no outstanding long lived readers, verified with mdb_stat -r. My workload used one transaction per read/write anyway (never needed larger atomicity). Once the db got into the bad state, running my program on it would almost immediately run into the issue again, so I really think the db is in a bad state such that most writes would cause it to hang, not related to how I do transactions. This workload would pretty consistently hit the issue once the db got to several hundred gb.
Issue #10236 on the OpenLDAP bug tracker might be the root cause, who knows. It's been marked CONFIRMED for years without a fix, while other similar issues are created.
This is extremely annoying. It seems workload dependent (other workloads I've run create absolutely massive lmdb dbs without this issue) and once it happens your only recourse is to make a new db and copy the contents over (thankfully reads still work fine on these borked dbs).
Other than that, though, it's great. Never in any case had actual data corruption, and reads and writes are extremely fast (until this issue happens)
Edit: fun fact, since shopify may have created Bolt in response to this bug, and then Bolt was the root cause of the 73-hour Roblox downtime in 2021, this bug may indirectly have caused one of the worst outages ever!
I can't go into specifics, but I use LMDB for the commandline application I maintain for my employer. I also extended it into a web service for internal use. As long as you stick to the safe LMDB options, which are the default options, it's reliable. The documentation clearly outlines what safety guarantees you lose when you enable/disable certain options: http://www.lmdb.tech/doc/group__mdb.html#ga32a193c6bf4d7d5c5...
I had a situation where the web service's writes were slowing down to an unbearable crawl because the number of entries in the database were reaching tens of billions of entries. Thankfully, the users never experienced the slowness. The website stayed nice and fast, even though the background updates were extraordinarily slow. The issue was fixed by sharding the databases.
Be cautious if you're using large databases on iOS. At least until fairly recently, iOS doesn't page dirty mmaped pages back to disk and after enough churn the app will OOM.
It is a small amount of code so easy to integrate into an application.
It is really reliable except write performance in my experience.
Author of it writes very spicy stuff and sounds pretty rude.
I would recommend doing a prototype with real data scale and testing if it meets your requirements. The write performance can be really atrocious and It doesn't have a high performance potential because it is based on memmap.
Maybe rephrase this part - "It is read-only by default as this provides total immunity to corruption. Using read-write mode offers much higher write performance, but adds the possibility for stray application writes thru pointers to silently corrupt the database."
I generally do think read-write mode would offer higher write performance than read only as well :)
that could easily be trojan-horsed with links to malware if you are viewing it in a poorly secured setting (like public wifi), because you can't verify the origin. so the best we can say about the author is that we are getting inconsistent signals on how seriously they understand and implement security concerns. so better review that code carefully before use, rather than assuming their expertise from release notes.
Judging from this very release, where he implemented support for page-level checksums and encryption for LMBD, I assume the author knows a thing or two about encryption. He probably then deemed it unnecessary for this specific website.
Do people have good experiences with LMDB, in terms of reliability? I've never used it in production, but I've read through the code and design documents for a database implementation class.
I remember some strange code (such as pushing return values 4k above the stack, with a comment like "this works as long as the caller doesn't use more than 4k of stack space before accessing the return value"), and the author also shared some unconventional opinions about undefined behavior (like "Compilers are deterministic, if I know what platform I'm compiling to then no behavior is undefined. And if compiler authors disagree, they are morons.")
But presumably it's thoroughly tested, so those aren't problems in practice? Would be really interested to hear from people who've actually used it. I've mainly stuck to SQLite instead.
Not amazing. In certain workloads I ran, once the db reached several hundred gb, writes would hang for longer and longer periods of time, eventually hours, while the db grew drastically in the background. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023623 seems to be the same issue, and it was serious enough that Shopify decided not to use lmdb.
And yes, I ensured there were no outstanding long lived readers, verified with mdb_stat -r. My workload used one transaction per read/write anyway (never needed larger atomicity). Once the db got into the bad state, running my program on it would almost immediately run into the issue again, so I really think the db is in a bad state such that most writes would cause it to hang, not related to how I do transactions. This workload would pretty consistently hit the issue once the db got to several hundred gb.
Issue #10236 on the OpenLDAP bug tracker might be the root cause, who knows. It's been marked CONFIRMED for years without a fix, while other similar issues are created.
This is extremely annoying. It seems workload dependent (other workloads I've run create absolutely massive lmdb dbs without this issue) and once it happens your only recourse is to make a new db and copy the contents over (thankfully reads still work fine on these borked dbs).
Other than that, though, it's great. Never in any case had actual data corruption, and reads and writes are extremely fast (until this issue happens)
Edit: fun fact, since shopify may have created Bolt in response to this bug, and then Bolt was the root cause of the 73-hour Roblox downtime in 2021, this bug may indirectly have caused one of the worst outages ever!
I can't go into specifics, but I use LMDB for the commandline application I maintain for my employer. I also extended it into a web service for internal use. As long as you stick to the safe LMDB options, which are the default options, it's reliable. The documentation clearly outlines what safety guarantees you lose when you enable/disable certain options: http://www.lmdb.tech/doc/group__mdb.html#ga32a193c6bf4d7d5c5...
I had a situation where the web service's writes were slowing down to an unbearable crawl because the number of entries in the database were reaching tens of billions of entries. Thankfully, the users never experienced the slowness. The website stayed nice and fast, even though the background updates were extraordinarily slow. The issue was fixed by sharding the databases.
Be cautious if you're using large databases on iOS. At least until fairly recently, iOS doesn't page dirty mmaped pages back to disk and after enough churn the app will OOM.
I believe at least one of the two official Minecraft implementations use it for their map/save format.
It has been used successfully as the backend for OpenLDAP and Monero, at least.
It is a small amount of code so easy to integrate into an application.
It is really reliable except write performance in my experience.
Author of it writes very spicy stuff and sounds pretty rude.
I would recommend doing a prototype with real data scale and testing if it meets your requirements. The write performance can be really atrocious and It doesn't have a high performance potential because it is based on memmap.
Maybe rephrase this part - "It is read-only by default as this provides total immunity to corruption. Using read-write mode offers much higher write performance, but adds the possibility for stray application writes thru pointers to silently corrupt the database."
I generally do think read-write mode would offer higher write performance than read only as well :)
New features in LMDB 1.0 include:
- support for incremental backup
- support for page-level checksums and encryption
- support for DB on raw block devices
- support for 2-phase commit
- support for page sizes up to 64KB
plus other minor additions to the API.
HTTP ?? Com’on man
it is just a link to documentation
that could easily be trojan-horsed with links to malware if you are viewing it in a poorly secured setting (like public wifi), because you can't verify the origin. so the best we can say about the author is that we are getting inconsistent signals on how seriously they understand and implement security concerns. so better review that code carefully before use, rather than assuming their expertise from release notes.
TLS certs are freeeeee
Judging from this very release, where he implemented support for page-level checksums and encryption for LMBD, I assume the author knows a thing or two about encryption. He probably then deemed it unnecessary for this specific website.
Cryptography engineers are not excluded from being lazy sysadmins.
What do you mean "lazy"? I thought you said TLS certs were free. Do you mean they cost something after all? Time, for example?
Anyway, of course in case you feel the website is a risk, you should refrain from using it. Safety comes first.