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There is a very nice guide on optimizing linux machine for Neo4j. But this guide assumes the typical characteristics of a physical hard drive. I am running my Neo4j instances on Google CE and Amazon EC2. I am unable to find any document detailing an optimal setup for these virtual machines. What resources do I need in terms of memory (for heap or extended use) and disk speed / IOPS to get an optimal performance? I currently have a couple of million nodes and about ten million relationships (2 GBs) and the data size is increasing with imports.

On EC2 I used to rely on SSD scratch disks and then make regular backups to permanent disks. There is no such thing available on Compute Engines, and the write speeds don't seem very high to me, at least at normal disk sizes (because speed changes with size). Is there any way to get a reasonable performance on my import/index operations? Or maybe these operations have more to do with memory and compute capacities?

Any additional reading is welcome...

retrography
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  • One more detailed answer available @ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26751346/how-do-you-set-up-neo4j-to-work-with-google-compute-engine/26752772#26752772 – Love Sharma Nov 07 '14 at 01:49

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Use local disks whenever possible, SSDs are better than other, try provisioned ops on AWS.

EBS is not a good fit, it is slow and jittery.

No idea for compute engine though, you might want to use more RAM and try to load larger parts of the graph into memory then.

Additional reading: http://structr.org/blog/neo4j-performance-on-ext4

You still should check the other things mentioned in that blog post. Like Linux scheduler, write barriers etc.

Better to set those memory mapping settings manually. And for the 2nd level caches probably check out the enterprise version with the hpc cache.

See also this webinar: https://vimeo.com/46049647 on hw-sizing

Michael Hunger
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  • That's an excellent article. If my memory is large enough to hold the whole database, do I need to tweak the memory mapping settings in order to have Neo4j keep the data in memory? – retrography Apr 05 '14 at 05:38
  • Response to myself: Apparently one can use cache_type=strong if there is enough memory available. Ref: http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/configuration-caches.html – retrography May 30 '14 at 14:12