How to space out influxdb continuous query execution?

Question

I have many influxdb continuous queries(CQ) used to downsample data over a period of time on several occasions. At one point, the load became high and influxdb went to out of memory at the time of executing continuous queries.

Say I have 10 CQ and all the 10 CQ execute in influxdb at a time. That impacts the memory heavily. I am not sure whether there is any way to evenly space out or have some delay in executing each CQ one by one. My speculation is executing all the CQ at the same time makes a influxdb crash. All the CQ are specified in influxdb config. I hope there may be a way to include time delay between the CQ in the influx config. I didn't know exactly how to include the time delay in the config. One sample CQ:

CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY "cq_volume_reads" ON "metrics" 
BEGIN 
    SELECT sum(reads) as reads INTO rollup1.tire_volume FROM
    "metrics".raw.tier_volume GROUP BY time(10m),* 
END

And also I don't know whether this is the best way to resolve the problem. Any thoughts on this approach or suggesting any better approach will be much appreciated. It would be great to get suggestions in using debugging tools for influxdb as well. Thanks!

Answer 1

@Rajan - A few comments:

• The canonical documentation for CQs is here. Much of what I'm suggesting is from there.
• Are you using back-referencing? I see your example CQ uses GROUP BY time(10m),* - the * wildcard is usually used with backreferences. Otherwise, I don't believe you need to include the * to indicate grouping by all tags - it should already be grouped by all tags.
• If you are using backreferences, that runs the CQ for each measurement in the metrics database. This is potentially very many CQ executions at the same time, especially if you have many CQ defined this way.
• You can set offsets with GROUP BY time(10m, <offset>) but this also impacts the time interval used for your aggregation function (sum in your example) so if your offset is 1 minute then timestamps will be a sum of data between e.g. 13:11->13:21 instead of 13:10 -> 13:20. This will offset execution but may not work for your downsampling use case. From a signal processing standpoint, a 1 minute offset wouldn't change the validity of the downsampled data, but it might produce unwanted graphical display problems depending on what you are doing. I do suggest trying this option.
• Otherwise, you can try to reduce the number of downsampling CQs to reduce memory pressure or downsample on a larger timescale (e.g. 20m) or lastly, increase the hardware resources available to InfluxDB.
• For managing memory usage, look at this post. There are not many adjustments in 1.8 but there are some.