nilmdb/design.md

Structure

nilmdb.nilmdb is the NILM database interface. It tracks a PyTables database holds actual rows of data, and a SQL database tracks metadata and ranges.

Access to the nilmdb must be single-threaded. This is handled with the nilmdb.serializer class.

nilmdb.server is a HTTP server that provides an interface to talk, thorugh the serialization layer, to the nilmdb object.

nilmdb.client is a HTTP client that connects to this.

Sqlite performance

Committing a transaction in the default sync mode (PRAGMA synchronous=FULL) takes about 125msec. sqlite3 will commit transactions at 3 times:

1: explicit con.commit()

2: between a series of DML commands and non-DML commands, e.g. after a series of INSERT, SELECT, but before a CREATE TABLE or PRAGMA.

3: at the end of an explicit transaction, e.g. "with self.con as con:"

To speed up testing, or if this transaction speed becomes an issue, the sync=False option to NilmDB will set PRAGMA synchronous=OFF.

Inserting streams

We need to send the contents of "data" as POST. Do we need chunked transfer?

• Don't know the size in advance, so we would need to use chunked if we send the entire thing in one request.
• But we shouldn't send one chunk per line, so we need to buffer some anyway; why not just make new requests?
• Consider the infinite-streaming case, we might want to send it immediately? Not really -- server still should do explicit inserts of fixed-size chunks.
• Even chunked encoding needs the size of each chunk beforehand, so everything still gets buffered. Just a tradeoff of buffer size.

Before timestamps are added:

• Raw data is about 440 kB/s (9 channels)

• Prep data is about 12.5 kB/s (1 phase)

• How do we know how much data to send?

  • Remember that we can only do maybe 8-50 transactions per second on the sqlite database. So if one block of inserted data is one transaction, we'd need the raw case to be around 64kB per request, ideally more.
  • Maybe use a range, based on how long it's taking to read the data
    • If no more data, send it
    • If data > 1 MB, send it
    • If more than 10 seconds have elapsed, send it
  • Should those numbers come from the server?

Converting from ASCII to PyTables:

• For each row getting added, we need to set attributes on a PyTables Row object and call table.append(). This means that there isn't a particularly efficient way of converting from ascii.
• Could create a function like nilmdb.layout.Layout("foo".fillRow(asciiline)
  • But this means we're doing parsing on the serialized side
  • Let's keep parsing on the threaded server side so we can detect errors better, and not block the serialized nilmdb for a slow parsing process.
• Client sends ASCII data
• Server converts this ACSII data to a list of values

  • Maybe:

    # threaded side creates this object
    parser = nilmdb.layout.Parser("layout_name")
    # threaded side parses and fills it with data
    parser.parse(textdata)
    # serialized side pulls out rows
    for n in xrange(parser.nrows):
        parser.fill_row(rowinstance, n)
    	table.append()
    

Inserting streams, inside nilmdb

• First check that the new stream doesn't overlap.
  • Get minimum timestamp, maximum timestamp from data parser.
    • (extend parser to verify monotonicity and track extents)
  • Get all intervals for this stream in the database
  • See if new interval overlaps any existing ones
    • If so, bail
  • Question: should we cache intervals inside NilmDB?
    • Assume database is fast for now, and always rebuild fom DB.
    • Can add a caching layer later if we need to.
  • stream_get_ranges(path) -> return IntervalSet?

Speed

• First approach was quadratic. Adding four hours of data:

  $ time zcat /home/jim/bpnilm-data/snapshot-1-20110513-110002.raw.gz | ./nilmtool.py insert -s 20110513-110000 /bpnilm/1/raw real 24m31.093s $ time zcat /home/jim/bpnilm-data/snapshot-1-20110513-110002.raw.gz | ./nilmtool.py insert -s 20110513-120001 /bpnilm/1/raw real 43m44.528s $ time zcat /home/jim/bpnilm-data/snapshot-1-20110513-110002.raw.gz | ./nilmtool.py insert -s 20110513-130002 /bpnilm/1/raw real 93m29.713s $ time zcat /home/jim/bpnilm-data/snapshot-1-20110513-110002.raw.gz | ./nilmtool.py insert -s 20110513-140003 /bpnilm/1/raw real 166m53.007s

• Disabling pytables indexing didn't help:

  real 31m21.492s real 52m51.963s real 102m8.151s real 176m12.469s

• Server RAM usage is constant.

• Speed problems were due to IntervalSet speed, of parsing intervals from the database and adding the new one each time.

  • First optimization is to cache result of nilmdb:_get_intervals, which gives the best speedup.

  • Also switched to internally using bxInterval from bx-python package. Speed of tests/test_interval:TestIntervalSpeed is pretty decent and seems to be growing logarithmically now. About 85μs per insertion for inserting 131k entries.

  • Storing the interval data in SQL might be better, with a scheme like: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/blog/01235197474

• Next slowdown target is nilmdb.layout.Parser.parse().

  • Rewrote parsers using cython and sscanf
  • Stats (rev 10831), with _add_interval disabled layout.pyx.Parser.parse:128 6303 sec, 262k calls layout.pyx.parse:63 13913 sec, 5.1g calls numpy:records.py.fromrecords:569 7410 sec, 262k calls
  • Probably OK for now.

IntervalSet speed

• Initial implementation was pretty slow, even with binary search in sorted list

• Replaced with bxInterval; now takes about log n time for an insertion

  • TestIntervalSpeed with range(17,18) and profiling
    • 85 μs each
    • 131072 calls to __iadd__
    • 131072 to bx.insert_interval
    • 131072 to bx.insert:395
    • 2355835 to bx.insert:106 (18x as many?)

• Tried blist too, worse than bxinterval.

• Might be algorithmic improvements to be made in Interval.py, like in __and__

Layouts

Current/old design has specific layouts: RawData, PrepData, RawNotchedData. Let's get rid of this entirely and switch to simpler data types that are just collections and counts of a single type. We'll still use strings to describe them, with format:

type_count

where type is "uint16", "float32", or "float64", and count is an integer.

nilmdb.layout.named() will parse these strings into the appropriate handlers. For compatibility:

"RawData" == "uint16_6"
"RawNotchedData" == "uint16_9"
"PrepData" == "float32_8"