Load Base Split

Load Base Split is a new feature introduced in TiDB 4.0. It aims to solve the hotspot issue caused by unbalanced access between Regions, such as full table scans for small tables.

Scenarios

In TiDB, it is easy to generate hotspots when the load is concentrated on certain nodes. PD tries to schedule the hot Regions so that they are distributed as evenly as possible across all nodes for better performance.

However, the minimum unit for PD scheduling is Region. If the number of hotspots in a cluster is smaller than the number of nodes, or if a few hotspots have far more load than other Regions, PD can only move the hotspot from one node to another, but not make the entire cluster share the load.

This scenario is especially common with workloads that are mostly read requests, such as full table scans and index lookups for small tables, or frequent access to some fields.

Previously, the solution to this problem was to manually execute a command to split one or more hotspot Regions, but this approach has two problems:

• Evenly splitting a Region is not always the best choice, because requests might be concentrated on a few keys. In such cases, hotspots might still be on one of the Regions after evenly splitting, and it might take multiple even splits to realize the goal.
• Human intervention is not timely or simple.

Implementation principles

Load Base Split automatically splits the Region based on statistics. It identifies the Regions whose read load consistently exceeds the threshold for 10 seconds, and splits these Regions at a proper position. When choosing the split position, Load Base Split tries to balance the access load of both Regions after the split and avoid access across Regions.

The Region split by Load Base Split will not be merged quickly. On the one hand, PD's MergeChecker skips the hot Regions; on the other hand, PD also determines whether to merge two Regions according to QPS in the heartbeat information, to avoid the merging of two Regions with high QPS.

Usage

The Load Base Split feature is currently controlled by the split.qps-threshold parameter (QPS threshold) and split.byte-threshold parameter (traffic threshold). If the sum of all types of read requests per second for a Region exceeds the QPS threshold or traffic threshold for 10 consecutive seconds, PD splits the Region.

Load Base Split is enabled by default, but the parameter is set to a rather high value. split.qps-threshold defaults to 3000 and split.byte-threshold defaults to 30MB/s. If you want to disable this feature, set the two thresholds high enough at the same time.

To modify the parameter, take either of the following two methods:

• Use a SQL statement:

  set config tikv split.qps-threshold=3000
  

• Use TiKV:

  curl -X POST "http://ip:status_port/config" -H "accept: application/json" -d '{"split.qps-threshold":"3000"}'
  

Accordingly, you can view the configuration by either of the following two methods:

• Use a SQL statement:

  show config where type='tikv' and name like '%split.qps-threshold%'
  

• Use TiKV:

  curl "http://ip:status_port/config"