Traditional storage architectures often struggle to keep pace with modern applications’ increasing demand for performance and scalability. Lightbits addresses these challenges with a robust, software-defined storage solution leveraging the NVMe over TCP protocol. This innovative approach enables high-performance and low-latency storage over standard ethernet, simplifying storage management and boosting operations with exceptional speed. Its efficient resource utilization and scalability make it an ideal solution for demanding applications, including modern databases like Aerospike.
Can Aerospike Perform Better with Lightbits Volumes?
Aerospike, a NoSQL database that typically utilizes local SSD drives, is often the go-to solution for performance-critical workloads. Recently, we set out to determine whether Lightbits volumes could match or exceed the performance of local SSDs when used with Aerospike.
Testing Aerospike with Lightbits Volumes
Our primary focus has been on testing Aerospike’s performance when using Lightbits volumes. For this, we used a Lightbits cluster running version 3.12.1, along with a server running Debian 11 and Aerospike Community Edition 6.2.0.0, ensuring that the software versions were up-to-date.
We used asbench, a benchmarking tool created by Aerospike and designed to simulate application clients connecting to a database. This tool measures end-to-end performance, including Transactions Per Second (TPS) and latency, providing a comprehensive understanding of how the database behaves under real-world conditions.
To ensure consistency and reliability, we ran asbench for extended durations of 12 hours per test. Our test workload consisted of object sizes of 1 KB, 1.5 KB (1536 bytes), and 2 KB, simulating typical key-value store operations. We used an 80% read and 20% write ratio, simulating a typical customer environment.
We aimed to achieve TPS values close to or exceeding production scenarios.
During the tests, asbench was run from multiple application servers against various Aerospike servers to identify any performance variations.
We ran asbench using the command below, with the parameters outlined earlier:
Performance Results
The results were impressive:
- By fine-tuning the threads parameter and configuring it to 40, we achieved a minimum of 100K TPS, with peaks reaching around 150K TPS, depending on the Aerospike server hardware.
- Latency metrics were equally remarkable. HDR histograms provide a detailed view of latency distribution, showing the percentage of transactions that fall within specific latency ranges.
HDR histograms revealed that in one of the tests, 99.9121% of the transactions completed in less than 1 millisecond, with a maximum latency of 950 microseconds.
These numbers demonstrate that Lightbits volumes can deliver exceptional performance for Aerospike workloads, rivaling or even surpassing setups using local SSD drives.
Hardware Analysis
To better understand what influenced these results, we analyzed the Aerospike servers’ hardware used in our tests:
- CPU: The number of CPUs had minimal impact, as Aerospike utilized only a small fraction of CPU resources, leaving most CPUs idle.
- RAM: Memory usage was consistently low and did not affect performance.
- NIC (Network Interface Card): Although all NICs in the tests were identical and supported network throughput of up to 100 Gbps, the throughput never exceeded 10 Gbps.
Interestingly, one key factor emerged: servers with higher CPU frequency and performance-tuned power settings delivered noticeably better results, including higher TPS values and lower latency. Specifically, we adjusted the BIOS power settings to prioritize performance, ensuring that the CPUs consistently operated at their maximum frequency.
Conclusion
Our testing confirmed that Lightbits volumes are an excellent storage solution for Aerospike, offering high throughput and low latency. Combined with optimized server hardware settings, this pairing could unlock Aerospike’s full potential, making it a perfect choice for demanding environments that require robust performance.
Beyond low latency, Lightbits provides additional benefits for Aerospike deployments. Its software-defined architecture offers flexible scaling and resource management, reducing operational overhead and enabling seamless adaptation to changing workloads and capacity requirements.
By leveraging Lightbits, you can build an agile, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure for your Aerospike database, ensuring it not only meets but exceeds the demands of even the most performance-sensitive applications.
