Binary search in a sorted (memory-mapped ?) file in Java
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/736556
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09-09-2019 - |
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I am struggling to port a Perl program to Java, and learning Java as I go. A central component of the original program is a Perl module that does string prefix lookups in a +500 GB sorted text file using binary search (essentially, "seek" to a byte offset in the middle of the file, backtrack to nearest newline, compare line prefix with the search string, "seek" to half/double that byte offset, repeat until found...)
I have experimented with several database solutions but found that nothing beats this in sheer lookup speed with data sets of this size. Do you know of any existing Java library that implements such functionality? Failing that, could you point me to some idiomatic example code that does random access reads in text files?
Alternatively, I am not familiar with the new (?) Java I/O libraries but would it be an option to memory-map the 500 GB text file (I'm on a 64-bit machine with memory to spare) and do binary search on the memory-mapped byte array? I would be very interested to hear any experiences you have to share about this and similar problems.
Solution
I am a big fan of Java's MappedByteBuffers for situations like this. It is blazing fast. Below is a snippet I put together for you that maps a buffer to the file, seeks to the middle, and then searches backwards to a newline character. This should be enough to get you going?
I have similar code (seek, read, repeat until done) in my own application, benchmarked
java.io streams against MappedByteBuffer in a production environment and posted the results on my blog (Geekomatic posts tagged 'java.nio' ) with raw data, graphs and all.
Two second summary? My MappedByteBuffer-based implementation was about 275% faster. YMMV.
To work for files larger than ~2GB, which is a problem because of the cast and .position(int pos), I've crafted paging algorithm backed by an array of MappedByteBuffers. You'll need to be working on a 64-bit system for this to work with files larger than 2-4GB because MBB's use the OS's virtual memory system to work their magic.
public class StusMagicLargeFileReader {
private static final long PAGE_SIZE = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
private List<MappedByteBuffer> buffers = new ArrayList<MappedByteBuffer>();
private final byte raw[] = new byte[1];
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
File file = new File("/Users/stu/test.txt");
FileChannel fc = (new FileInputStream(file)).getChannel();
StusMagicLargeFileReader buffer = new StusMagicLargeFileReader(fc);
long position = file.length() / 2;
String candidate = buffer.getString(position--);
while (position >=0 && !candidate.equals('\n'))
candidate = buffer.getString(position--);
//have newline position or start of file...do other stuff
}
StusMagicLargeFileReader(FileChannel channel) throws IOException {
long start = 0, length = 0;
for (long index = 0; start + length < channel.size(); index++) {
if ((channel.size() / PAGE_SIZE) == index)
length = (channel.size() - index * PAGE_SIZE) ;
else
length = PAGE_SIZE;
start = index * PAGE_SIZE;
buffers.add(index, channel.map(READ_ONLY, start, length));
}
}
public String getString(long bytePosition) {
int page = (int) (bytePosition / PAGE_SIZE);
int index = (int) (bytePosition % PAGE_SIZE);
raw[0] = buffers.get(page).get(index);
return new String(raw);
}
}
OTHER TIPS
I have the same problem. I am trying to find all lines that start with some prefix in a sorted file.
Here is a method I cooked up which is largely a port of Python code found here: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/blog/01186620415
I have tested it but not thoroughly just yet. It does not use memory mapping, though.
public static List<String> binarySearch(String filename, String string) {
List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>();
try {
File file = new File(filename);
RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile(file, "r");
long low = 0;
long high = file.length();
long p = -1;
while (low < high) {
long mid = (low + high) / 2;
p = mid;
while (p >= 0) {
raf.seek(p);
char c = (char) raf.readByte();
//System.out.println(p + "\t" + c);
if (c == '\n')
break;
p--;
}
if (p < 0)
raf.seek(0);
String line = raf.readLine();
//System.out.println("-- " + mid + " " + line);
if (line.compareTo(string) < 0)
low = mid + 1;
else
high = mid;
}
p = low;
while (p >= 0) {
raf.seek(p);
if (((char) raf.readByte()) == '\n')
break;
p--;
}
if (p < 0)
raf.seek(0);
while (true) {
String line = raf.readLine();
if (line == null || !line.startsWith(string))
break;
result.add(line);
}
raf.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("IOException:");
e.printStackTrace();
}
return result;
}
I am not aware of any library that has that functionality. However, a correct code for a external binary search in Java should be similar to this:
class ExternalBinarySearch {
final RandomAccessFile file;
final Comparator<String> test; // tests the element given as search parameter with the line. Insert a PrefixComparator here
public ExternalBinarySearch(File f, Comparator<String> test) throws FileNotFoundException {
this.file = new RandomAccessFile(f, "r");
this.test = test;
}
public String search(String element) throws IOException {
long l = file.length();
return search(element, -1, l-1);
}
/**
* Searches the given element in the range [low,high]. The low value of -1 is a special case to denote the beginning of a file.
* In contrast to every other line, a line at the beginning of a file doesn't need a \n directly before the line
*/
private String search(String element, long low, long high) throws IOException {
if(high - low < 1024) {
// search directly
long p = low;
while(p < high) {
String line = nextLine(p);
int r = test.compare(line,element);
if(r > 0) {
return null;
} else if (r < 0) {
p += line.length();
} else {
return line;
}
}
return null;
} else {
long m = low + ((high - low) / 2);
String line = nextLine(m);
int r = test.compare(line, element);
if(r > 0) {
return search(element, low, m);
} else if (r < 0) {
return search(element, m, high);
} else {
return line;
}
}
}
private String nextLine(long low) throws IOException {
if(low == -1) { // Beginning of file
file.seek(0);
} else {
file.seek(low);
}
int bufferLength = 65 * 1024;
byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferLength];
int r = file.read(buffer);
int lineBeginIndex = -1;
// search beginning of line
if(low == -1) { //beginning of file
lineBeginIndex = 0;
} else {
//normal mode
for(int i = 0; i < 1024; i++) {
if(buffer[i] == '\n') {
lineBeginIndex = i + 1;
break;
}
}
}
if(lineBeginIndex == -1) {
// no line begins within next 1024 bytes
return null;
}
int start = lineBeginIndex;
for(int i = start; i < r; i++) {
if(buffer[i] == '\n') {
// Found end of line
return new String(buffer, lineBeginIndex, i - lineBeginIndex + 1);
return line.toString();
}
}
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Line to long");
}
}
Please note: I made up this code ad-hoc: Corner cases are not tested nearly good enough, the code assumes that no single line is larger than 64K, etc.
I also think that building an index of the offsets where lines start might be a good idea. For a 500 GB file, that index should be stored in an index file. You should gain a not-so-small constant factor with that index because than there is no need to search for the next line in each step.
I know that was not the question, but building a prefix tree data structure like (Patrica) Tries (on disk/SSD) might be a good idea to do the prefix search.
This is a simple example of what you want to achieve. I would probably first index the file, keeping track of the file position for each string. I'm assuming the strings are separated by newlines (or carriage returns):
RandomAccessFile file = new RandomAccessFile("filename.txt", "r");
List<Long> indexList = new ArrayList();
long pos = 0;
while (file.readLine() != null)
{
Long linePos = new Long(pos);
indexList.add(linePos);
pos = file.getFilePointer();
}
int indexSize = indexList.size();
Long[] indexArray = new Long[indexSize];
indexList.toArray(indexArray);
The last step is to convert to an array for a slight speed improvement when doing lots of lookups. I would probably convert the Long[] to a long[] also, but I did not show that above. Finally the code to read the string from a given indexed position:
int i; // Initialize this appropriately for your algorithm.
file.seek(indexArray[i]);
String line = file.readLine();
// At this point, line contains the string #i.
If you are dealing with a 500GB file, then you might want to use a faster lookup method than binary search - namely a radix sort which is essentially a variant of hashing. The best method for doing this really depends on your data distributions and types of lookup, but if you are looking for string prefixes there should be a good way to do this.
I posted an example of a radix sort solution for integers, but you can use the same idea - basically to cut down the sort time by dividing the data into buckets, then using O(1) lookup to retrieve the bucket of data that is relevant.
Option Strict On
Option Explicit On
Module Module1
Private Const MAX_SIZE As Integer = 100000
Private m_input(MAX_SIZE) As Integer
Private m_table(MAX_SIZE) As List(Of Integer)
Private m_randomGen As New Random()
Private m_operations As Integer = 0
Private Sub generateData()
' fill with random numbers between 0 and MAX_SIZE - 1
For i = 0 To MAX_SIZE - 1
m_input(i) = m_randomGen.Next(0, MAX_SIZE - 1)
Next
End Sub
Private Sub sortData()
For i As Integer = 0 To MAX_SIZE - 1
Dim x = m_input(i)
If m_table(x) Is Nothing Then
m_table(x) = New List(Of Integer)
End If
m_table(x).Add(x)
' clearly this is simply going to be MAX_SIZE -1
m_operations = m_operations + 1
Next
End Sub
Private Sub printData(ByVal start As Integer, ByVal finish As Integer)
If start < 0 Or start > MAX_SIZE - 1 Then
Throw New Exception("printData - start out of range")
End If
If finish < 0 Or finish > MAX_SIZE - 1 Then
Throw New Exception("printData - finish out of range")
End If
For i As Integer = start To finish
If m_table(i) IsNot Nothing Then
For Each x In m_table(i)
Console.WriteLine(x)
Next
End If
Next
End Sub
' run the entire sort, but just print out the first 100 for verification purposes
Private Sub test()
m_operations = 0
generateData()
Console.WriteLine("Time started = " & Now.ToString())
sortData()
Console.WriteLine("Time finished = " & Now.ToString & " Number of operations = " & m_operations.ToString())
' print out a random 100 segment from the sorted array
Dim start As Integer = m_randomGen.Next(0, MAX_SIZE - 101)
printData(start, start + 100)
End Sub
Sub Main()
test()
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
End Module
I post a gist https://gist.github.com/mikee805/c6c2e6a35032a3ab74f643a1d0f8249c
that is rather complete example based on what I found on stack overflow and some blogs hopefully someone else can use it
import static java.nio.file.Files.isWritable;
import static java.nio.file.StandardOpenOption.READ;
import static org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.forceMkdir;
import static org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.closeQuietly;
import static org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils.isBlank;
import static org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils.trimToNull;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.Buffer;
import java.nio.MappedByteBuffer;
import java.nio.channels.FileChannel;
import java.nio.file.Path;
public class FileUtils {
private FileUtils() {
}
private static boolean found(final String candidate, final String prefix) {
return isBlank(candidate) || candidate.startsWith(prefix);
}
private static boolean before(final String candidate, final String prefix) {
return prefix.compareTo(candidate.substring(0, prefix.length())) < 0;
}
public static MappedByteBuffer getMappedByteBuffer(final Path path) {
FileChannel fileChannel = null;
try {
fileChannel = FileChannel.open(path, READ);
return fileChannel.map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_ONLY, 0, fileChannel.size()).load();
}
catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
finally {
closeQuietly(fileChannel);
}
}
public static String binarySearch(final String prefix, final MappedByteBuffer buffer) {
if (buffer == null) {
return null;
}
try {
long low = 0;
long high = buffer.limit();
while (low < high) {
int mid = (int) ((low + high) / 2);
final String candidate = getLine(mid, buffer);
if (found(candidate, prefix)) {
return trimToNull(candidate);
}
else if (before(candidate, prefix)) {
high = mid;
}
else {
low = mid + 1;
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
return null;
}
private static String getLine(int position, final MappedByteBuffer buffer) {
// search backwards to the find the proceeding new line
// then search forwards again until the next new line
// return the string in between
final StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
// walk it back
char candidate = (char)buffer.get(position);
while (position > 0 && candidate != '\n') {
candidate = (char)buffer.get(--position);
}
// we either are at the beginning of the file or a new line
if (position == 0) {
// we are at the beginning at the first char
candidate = (char)buffer.get(position);
stringBuilder.append(candidate);
}
// there is/are char(s) after new line / first char
if (isInBuffer(buffer, position)) {
//first char after new line
candidate = (char)buffer.get(++position);
stringBuilder.append(candidate);
//walk it forward
while (isInBuffer(buffer, position) && candidate != ('\n')) {
candidate = (char)buffer.get(++position);
stringBuilder.append(candidate);
}
}
return stringBuilder.toString();
}
private static boolean isInBuffer(final Buffer buffer, int position) {
return position + 1 < buffer.limit();
}
public static File getOrCreateDirectory(final String dirName) {
final File directory = new File(dirName);
try {
forceMkdir(directory);
isWritable(directory.toPath());
}
catch (IOException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
return directory;
}
}
I had similar problem, so I created (Scala) library from solutions provided in this thread:
https://github.com/avast/BigMap
It contains utility for sorting huge file and binary search in this sorted file...
If you truly want to try memory mapping the file, I found a tutorial on how to use memory mapping in Java nio.
