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Cluster sizing

In this guide, we discuss how to size your Quickwit cluster and nodes. As shown in the architecture section, a Quickwit cluster has 5 main components: the Indexers, Searchers, Control Plane, Metastore and, Janitor. Each component has different resource requirements and can be scaled independently. We will also discuss how to size the metastore PostgreSQL database.

note

This guide provides general guidelines. The actual resource requirements depend strongly on your workload. We recommend monitoring the resource usage and adjusting the cluster size accordingly.

Quickwit services​

Indexers​

Here are some high-level guidelines to size your Indexer nodes:

  • Quickwit can index at around 7.5MB per second per core
  • For the general use case, configure 4GB of RAM per core
    • Workloads with a large number of indexes or data sources consume more RAM
    • Don't use instances with less than 8GB of RAM
  • Mount the data directory to a volume of at least 110GB to store the split cache and the ingest queue.
  • Local SSDs are preferred for deploying Indexers since they generally provide the best performance per dollar and save some network bandwidth. However, remote disks can also if they provide roughly 20 MB/s of write throughput per core when using the ingest API or 10 MB/s when relying on other sources. For Amazon EBS volumes, this is equivalent to 320 or 160 IOPS per core (assuming 64 KB IOPS).
note

To utilize all CPUs on Indexer nodes that have more than 4 cores, your indexing workload needs to be broken down into multiple indexing pipelines. This can be achieved by creating multiple indexes or by using a partitioned data source such as Kafka.

Searchers​

Search performance is highly dependent on the workload. For example, term queries are usually cheaper than aggregations. A good starting point for dimensioning Searcher nodes:

  • Configure 8GB of RAM per core when using a high latency / low bandwidth object store like AWS S3
  • Decrease the RAM / CPU ratio (e.g 4GB/core) when using a faster object store
  • Provision more RAM if you expect many concurrent aggregation requests. By default, each request can use up to 500MB of RAM on each node.
  • Avoid instances with less than 4GB of RAM
  • Searcher nodes don't use disk unless the split cache is explicitly enabled

One strength of Quickwit is that its Searchers are stateless, which makes it easy to scale them up and down based on the workload. Scale the number of Searcher nodes based on:

  • the number of concurrent requests expected
  • aggregations that run on large amounts of data (without time or tag pruning)

Other services​

The Control Plane, Metastore and, Janitor are lightweight components. Each of these services requires 1 replica.

The Control Plane needs a single core and 2GB of RAM. It doesn't require any disk.

The Metastore also requires a single core and 2GB of RAM. For clusters handling hundreds of indexes, you may increase the size to 2 cores and 4GB of RAM. It doesn't write to disk.

In general, the Janitor requires 1 core and 2GB of RAM and doesn't use the disk. If you use the delete API, the Janitor should be dimensioned like an indexer.

Single node deployments​

For experimentations and small scale POCs, it is possible to deploy all the services on a single node (see tutorial). We recommend at least 2 cores and 8GB of RAM.

Postgres Metastore backend​

For most use cases, a PostgreSQL instance with 4GB of RAM and 1 core is sufficient:

  • with the AWS RDS managed service, use the t4g.medium instance type. Enable multi-AZ with one standby for high availability.