Mongo C driver, updating documents as fast as possible

Question

Quite simply, I need to store time series data in a document. I have decided that having a document responsible for a 30 minute period of data is reasonable. The document could look like this:

But this is only one of about a few hundred/thousand documents that will be updated every second.

{
    _id: "APAC.tky001.cpu.2011.12.04:10:00",
    field1: XX,
    field2: YY,
    1322971800: 22,
    1322971801: 23,
    1322971802: 21,

    // and so on
 }

This means that every 30 minutes, I create the document with _id, field1 and field2. Then, every second I would like to add a timestamp/value combination.

I am using the mongo c library, I was assuming it would be superfast but the way I am doing this requires an mongo_update which cannot be done in bulk. I don't think there's a way to use mongo_insert_batch.

Unfortunately, it's super slow - terrible performance. Am I doing this completely incorrectly? By terrible, I mean that by doing some crude work I get 600/second, in an alternate db (not naming names) I get 27,000/sec.

The code is approximately:

for (i=0;i<N;i++) {
    if (mongo_update(c,n,a,b,MONGO_UPDATE_UPSERT,write_concern) != MONGO_OK)
        // stuff
}

setting write concern off or on makes no difference.

Answer 1

Your updates are likely to grow documents out of bounds each time. This means that update is no longer cheap, because mongo has to copy the document to a new location. You could manually pad documents by inserting some large dummy value when creating the document and removing it later, so that your updates happen in-place. I'm not sure if you can manipulate collection-level paddingFactor directly.

In that another unnamed database you probably insert a row per entry, which is totally different operation from what you are doing here.

Answer 2

Mongo's latest c-driver does support bulk insert:

http://api.mongodb.org/c/current/bulk.html#bulk-insert

#include <assert.h>
#include <bcon.h>
#include <mongoc.h>
#include <stdio.h>

static void
bulk1 (mongoc_collection_t *collection)
{
   mongoc_bulk_operation_t *bulk;
   bson_error_t error;
   bson_t *doc;
   bson_t reply;
   char *str;
   bool ret;
   int i;

   bulk = mongoc_collection_create_bulk_operation (collection, true, NULL);

   for (i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
      doc = BCON_NEW ("i", BCON_INT32 (i));
      mongoc_bulk_operation_insert (bulk, doc);
      bson_destroy (doc);
   }

   ret = mongoc_bulk_operation_execute (bulk, &reply, &error);

   str = bson_as_json (&reply, NULL);
   printf ("%s\n", str);
   bson_free (str);

   if (!ret) {
      fprintf (stderr, "Error: %s\n", error.message);
   }

   bson_destroy (&reply);
   mongoc_bulk_operation_destroy (bulk);
}

int
main (int argc,
      char *argv[])
{
   mongoc_client_t *client;
   mongoc_collection_t *collection;

   mongoc_init ();

   client = mongoc_client_new ("mongodb://localhost/");
   collection = mongoc_client_get_collection (client, "test", "test");

   bulk1 (collection);

   mongoc_collection_destroy (collection);
   mongoc_client_destroy (client);

   mongoc_cleanup ();

   return 0;
}