Performance of Nats Jetstream

Question

I'm trying to understand how Nats Jetstream scales and have a couple of questions.

1. How efficient is subscribing by subject to historic messages? For example lets say have a stream foo that consists of 100 million messages with a subject of foo.bar and then a single message with a subject foo.baz. If I then make a subscription to foo.baz from the start of the stream will something on the server have to perform a linear scan of all messages in foo or will it be able to immediately seek to the foo.baz message.

2. How well does the system horizontally scale? I ask because I'm having issues getting Jetstream to scale much above a few thousand messages per second, regardless of how many machines I throw at it. Test parameters are as follows:

   • Nats Server 2.6.3 running on 4 core 8GB nodes
   • Single Stream replicated 3 times (disk or in-memory appears to make no difference)
   • 500 byte message payloads
   • n publishers each publishing 1k messages per second The bottleneck appears to be on the publishing side as I can retrieve messages at least as fast as I can publish them.

Answer 1

Would be good to get an opinion on this. I have a similar behaviour and the only way to achieve higher throughput for publishers is to lower replication (from 3 to 1) but that won't be an acceptable solution.

I have tried adding more resources (cpu/ram) with no success on increasing the publishing rate.

Also, scaling horizontally did not make any difference.

In my situation , i am using Bench tool to publish to js.

Answer 2

For an R3 filestore you can expect ~250k small msgs per second. If you utilize synchronous publish that will be dominated by RTT from the application to the system, and from the stream leader to the closest follower. You can use windowed intelligent async publish to get better performance.

You can get higher numbers with memory stores, but again will be dominated by RTT throughout the system.

If you give me a sense of how large are your messages we can show you some results from nats bench against the demo servers (R1) and NGS (R1 & R3).

For the original question regarding filtered consumers, >= 2.8.x will not do a linear scan to retrieve foo.baz. We could also show an example of this as well if it would help.

Feel free to join the slack channel (slack.nats.io) which is a pretty active community. Even feel free to DM me directly, happy to help.

Answer 3

Publishing in NATS JetStream is slightly different than publishing in Core NATS. Yes, you can publish a Core NATS message to a subject that is recorded by a stream and that message will indeed be captured in the stream, but in the case of the Core NATS publication, the publishing application does not expect an acknowledgement back from the nats-server, while in the case of the JetStream publish call, there is an acknowledgement sent back to the client from the nats-server that indicates that the message was indeed successfully persisted and replicated (or not).

So when you do js.Publish() you are actually making a synchronous relatively high latency request-reply (especially if your replication is 3 or 5, and more so if your stream is persisted to file, and depending on the network latency between the client application and the nats-server), which means that your throughput is going to be limited if you are just doing those synchronous publish calls back to back.

If you want throughput of publishing messages to a stream, you should use the asynchronous version of the JetStream publish call instead (i.e. you should use js.AsyncPublish() that returns a PubAckFuture).

However in that case you must also remember to introduce some amount of flow control by limiting the number of 'in-flight' asynchronous publish applications you want to have at any given time (this is because you can always publish asynchronously much much faster than the nats-server(s) can replicate and persist messages.

If you were to continuously publish asynchronously as fast as you can (e.g. when publishing the result of some kind of batch process) then you would eventually overwhelm your servers, which is something you really want to avoid.

You have two options to flow-control your JetStream async publications:

• specify a max number of in-flight asynchronous publication requests as an option when obtaining your JetStream context: i.e. js = nc.JetStream(nats.PublishAsyncMaxPending(100))
• Do a simple batch mechanism to check for the publication's PubAcks every so many asynchronous publications, like nats bench does: https://github.com/nats-io/natscli/blob/e6b2b478dbc432a639fbf92c5c89570438c31ee7/cli/bench_command.go#L476

About the expected performance: using async publications allows you to really get the throughput that NATS and JetStream are capable of. A simple way to validate or measure performance is to use the nats CLI tool (https://github.com/nats-io/natscli) to run benchmarks.

For example you can start with a simple test: nats bench foo --js --pub 4 --msgs 1000000 --replicas 3 (in memory stream with 3 replicas 4 go-routines each with it's own connection publishing 128 byte messages in batches of 100) and you should get a lot more than a few thousands messages per second.

For more information and examples of how to use the nats bench command you can take a look at this video: https://youtu.be/HwwvFeUHAyo