How Optimizing Memory Management with LMDB Boosted Performance on Our API Service

How Optimizing Memory Management with LMDB Boosted Performance on Our API Service

摘要

NGAPI, the API platform for serving all first party client API requests, requires optimized system performance to ensure a high success rate of requests and allow for maximum efficiency to provide Pinners worldwide with engaging content. Recently, our team made a significant improvement in handling memory pressure to our API service by implementing a Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) to streamline memory management and enhance the overall efficiency of our fleet of hosts. To handle parallelism, NGAPI relies on a multi-process architecture with gevent for per-process concurrency. However, at Pinterest scale, this can cause an increase in memory pressure, leading to efficiency bottlenecks. Moving to LMDB reduced our memory usage by 4.5%, an increase of 4.5 GB per host, which allowed us to increase the number of processes running on each host from 64 to 66, resulting in a greater number of requests each host could handle and better CPU utilization, thus reducing our overall fleet size. [1] The result? More happy Pinners, per host!