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Troubleshooting Write Timeouts in Typesense with Large CSVs

TLDR Agustin had issues with Typesense getting write timeouts while loading large CSV files. Kishore Nallan suggested chunking data or converting to JSONL before loading. Through troubleshooting, they identified a possible network problem at AWS and found a workaround.

29mo

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Jun 11, 2021 (30 months ago)

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Agustin

01:51 AM

Hi everyone! I'm using Typesense to index a large CSV of public records in an effort to enable government transparency.

For this purpose, I created a python script that loads a huge csv file, cleans it, separates it in chunks and imports records in parallel through the Typesense API. While the first few thousand records load correctly, I start getting write timeouts from the Typesense library seconds later:

ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', timeout('The write operation timed out'))

I tried retrying failing requests, but I can't even seem to catch the exceptions in the import_ function. My instance should have more than enough memory and CPU to handle everything. (10 cores/20 gb RAM with a 8gb dataset)

Any ideas?

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Kishore Nallan

02:23 AM

1. What does the Typesense log say?
2. Are you using the import API? If so, you don't have to parallelize the writes: the API itself has batching parameter that allows you to send large data in.

Agustin

03:07 AM

1. (Edit: I'm uploading full logs)
2. Because the dataset is bigger than local memory (> 8 gb) I can't load it all at once, so I use Dask Dataframes to load out-of-core and operate on chunks.

Kishore Nallan

03:18 AM

Can you generate a single JSONL file for your dataset (convert your CSV into a single JSONL file) and then try importing that using a single API call?

Agustin

03:19 AM

Here are the logs from the instance: https://gist.github.com/agucova/036b43981d80a4ef7a45495dbb8837fe

03:19

Agustin

03:19 AM

They don't show any error

Kishore Nallan

03:20 AM

Yeah the logs look fine. What's the free memory now on the machine?

Agustin

03:21 AM

And yes, I can probably to a middle step and convert first to a giant JSONL and then try the import.

Kishore Nallan

03:21 AM

I do see a response_abort called in the logs though.

03:21

Kishore Nallan

03:21 AM

That is logged when the import is aborted in the middle when the client disconnects.

03:22

Kishore Nallan

03:22 AM

I think you will have great success with a single JSONL file. Our import API is completely streaming and we regularly import several gigabytes of JSONL files into Typesense without any issues.

Agustin

03:23 AM

I won't need to load the JSONL file to memory, right?

Kishore Nallan

03:23 AM

The write timeouts could be an indication that the server is getting more writes than it can finish indexing within the default timeout interval. With a streaming import, we automatically handle this scenario.

03:24

Kishore Nallan

03:24 AM

> I won't need to load the JSONL file to memory, right?
Will depend on the http client used. It should be smart enough. Otherwise, just use CURL.

Agustin

03:26 AM

Seeing the API reference, it seems the Typesense library for Python would use batches while uploading JSONL, is that right?

Kishore Nallan

03:28 AM

The Python client does not accept a file name so it must be either a list of document objects or a stringified jsonl representation of the documents, neither of which will be streaming in nature.

03:28

Kishore Nallan

03:28 AM

So I suggest using CURL.

Agustin

03:29 AM

I understand. Thank you!

Kishore Nallan

03:29 AM

I have taken note to improve this aspect of the client.

Agustin

03:30 AM

My experience with Typesense has been awesome so far. We're migrating from AppSearch and we're just incredibly impressed by its performance.

03:30

Agustin

03:30 AM

Thank you for making the project open source!

Kishore Nallan

03:30 AM

Glad to hear, thank you for the feedback. Definitely want to keep making it better.

Agustin

03:31 AM

We would use Typesense Cloud, but we're an NGO with a very limited budget, so we're taking advantage of AWS credits at the moment. We will definitely consider migrating in the future.

Kishore Nallan

03:31 AM

Understood 👍

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Ricardo

08:11 AM

just as an aside I ran into similar yesterday and also had to chunk my upsert, which had 1000 documents, into something like 200 each chunk, for it to work.

08:12

Ricardo

08:12 AM

I am using a weak server, but my dataset is small.

Kishore Nallan

08:16 AM

Did you make a single import API call? Or ran imports parallely via code?

Ricardo

09:20 AM

typesense_client.collections['collection'].documents.import_(documents, {'action': 'upsert'})

09:20

Ricardo

09:20 AM

that's what I do

Kishore Nallan

09:20 AM

And the client times out?

Ricardo

09:21 AM

yeah, and at times also gave me an error parsing the response from the server. tbh I chunked it and didn't look at it more, since that fixed it.

Kishore Nallan

09:22 AM

Client timeout can occur depending on the size and number of documents, in which case you can bump up the client timeout value. It should then complete gracefully. It's a client config change.

Ricardo

09:23 AM

I did but it seemed to be timing out before my set timeout which was 10s

09:23

Ricardo

09:23 AM

anyway I can revisit it

09:23

Ricardo

09:23 AM

gonna have to make changes to my importer again

Kishore Nallan

09:23 AM

If request is terminated abruptly then it can also cause parse error.

09:24

Kishore Nallan

09:24 AM

If you can reproduce it consistently on a dataset you can share then I will be happy to troubleshoot.

Ricardo

09:32 AM

yeah I can share this dataset, I will take a look at it next time I am working on it and provide you with the dataset and the code that imports it.

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sonu

02:21 PM

i too had to increase my timeout to 10s for a 1000 doc import ..sometimes it would just drop few files... anyway increasing timeout fixed it

Jun 13, 2021 (29 months ago)

Agustin

02:18 AM

I generated JSONL files and tried curl, but now I get "curl: (18) transfer closed with outstanding read data remaining" from curl every time I upload a file.

02:18

Agustin

02:18 AM

Kishore Nallan

Kishore Nallan

02:21 AM

Can you please tell me:

a) How many lines does the generated JSONL file contain
b) What exact CURL command you are using?
c) How long does the CURL command run before getting this error?
d) After the curl command fails, how many records were imported successfully on Typesense?

Agustin

02:28 AM

a) 229061 (each jsonl file)
b)

curl -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: $TYPESENSE_API_KEY" -X POST --data-binary @$FILE \
      "http://$ENDPOINT/collections/revenue_entry/documents/import?action=create"

c) 1m 15s
d) Around 70k

Kishore Nallan

02:31 AM

Got it. Also, what is the size of the file with 229061 lines?

Agustin

02:31 AM

170MB

Kishore Nallan

02:32 AM

Hmm :thinking_face: That is perfectly fine and it should not time out this way... We regularly import files with millions of records for our demo. Are you importing these files from you local machine to remote machine? Or are you running the imports within the remote machine? Can you try doing the latter to see if it helps?

02:33

Kishore Nallan

02:33 AM

Basically, try copying a file onto the remote machine and then running the import command locally on that machine to see if it helps.

Agustin

02:34 AM

Local to remote, less than 80 ms latency to my container on AWS.

Kishore Nallan

02:35 AM

Okay, let's rule out any networking quirks between local to remote first.

Agustin

02:35 AM

There's an AWS Application Load Balancer in front of the container. I'll check its configuration.

Kishore Nallan

02:37 AM

If it repeatedly fails exactly at the 1min 15 secs interval, there might be some form of timeout configuration somewhere.

Agustin

02:42 AM

Can't find anything on the AWS ALB config.

Kishore Nallan

02:43 AM

I think if you just copied the file inside the instance and ran the import, we can rule this out easily. If the issue occurs again, then we know it is not network related.

Agustin

03:19 AM

Kishore Nallan I just uploaded the file from an instance in the same internal network as the container and I got the same result.

03:22

Agustin

03:22 AM

Wait, I think using a different subnet worked.

Kishore Nallan

03:25 AM

Is Typesense running inside Docker on a plain EC2 instance?

Agustin

03:35 AM

It's running on Docker with Fargate.

03:36

Agustin

03:36 AM

For now my workaround would be to upload through SFTP to a secondary instance and upload through the internal network. Still not sure what's causing the limit, but it's definitely a network component in AWS.

Kishore Nallan

03:57 AM

Ok glad to hear that it works with the work around. The application load balancer might have a default idle timeout which might have to be increased.

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