Mongodb on SGI servers

Question

We are planning to start a new project running on MongoDB. Our hardware partner recommends to use SGI (silicon graphics) servers because of the budget. But I have some concerns about it:

1) SGI UV NUMAlink and Shared Memory are compatible with MongoDB? 2) Does mongodb have a known performance issues on SGI? 2) It says Redhat and SuSE certified. Can I also use Debian flawlessly ?

I need help from anybody have an experience MongoDB on SGI. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

There shouldn't be any problem with getting MongoDB to run on a UV.

1) The UV uses Xenon processors, so this shouldn't be a problem, provided the addressed area of memory doesn't change from under the application. That is, when trying to access area A of memory, and the data has been moved to area B by another process, MongoDB will not like that.

2) Yes. You can use Debian without an issue - I have done this many times in production.

The UV is a fairly exotic machine to be running MongoDB on, so my reply is an educated guess having briefly used a UV before for testing.

Answer 2

You will have significant issue with MongoDB running well on a UV 2000. Any app that doesn't intelligently control its memory and process affinity using libnuma is going to pay the price on the UV because every bad allocation pays a much steeper penalty than on a 'regular' server that uses NUMA, there are just many more nodes, that are much further apart (node distance).

Mongo basically just detects numa capability and then prompts you to set the policy to interleave which is essentially just punting on their part.