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TiDB Lightning Deployment

This document describes the hardware requirements of TiDB Lightning on separate deployment and mixed deployment, and how to deploy it using TiDB Ansible or manually.

Notes

Before starting TiDB Lightning, note that:

  • During the import process, the cluster cannot provide normal services.

  • If tidb-lightning crashes, the cluster is left in "import mode". Forgetting to switch back to "normal mode" can lead to a high amount of uncompacted data on the TiKV cluster, and cause abnormally high CPU usage and stall. You can manually switch the cluster back to "normal mode" via the tidb-lightning-ctl tool:

    bin/tidb-lightning-ctl -switch-mode=normal

  • TiDB Lightning is required to have the following privileges in the downstream TiDB:

    PrivilegeScope
    SELECTTables
    INSERTTables
    UPDATETables
    DELETETables
    CREATEDatabases, tables
    DROPDatabases, tables
    ALTERTables

    If the checksum configuration item of TiDB Lightning is set to true, then the admin user privileges in the downstream TiDB need to be granted to TiDB Lightning.

Hardware requirements

tidb-lightning and tikv-importer are both resource-intensive programs. It is recommended to deploy them into two separate machines.

To achieve the best performance, it is recommended to use the following hardware configuration:

  • tidb-lightning:

    • 32+ logical cores CPU
    • An SSD large enough to store the entire data source, preferring higher read speed
    • 10 Gigabit network card (capable of transferring at ≥300 MB/s)
    • tidb-lightning fully consumes all CPU cores when running, and deploying on a dedicated machine is highly recommended. If not possible, tidb-lightning could be deployed together with other components like tidb-server, and the CPU usage could be limited via the region-concurrency setting.

  • tikv-importer:

    • 32+ logical cores CPU
    • 40 GB+ memory
    • 1 TB+ SSD, preferring higher IOPS (≥ 8000 is recommended)
      • The disk should be larger than the total size of the top N tables, where N = max(index-concurrency, table-concurrency).
    • 10 Gigabit network card (capable of transferring at ≥300 MB/s)
    • tikv-importer fully consumes all CPU, disk I/O and network bandwidth when running, and deploying on a dedicated machine is strongly recommended.

If you have sufficient machines, you can deploy multiple Lightning/Importer servers, with each working on a distinct set of tables, to import the data in parallel.

Additionally, the target TiKV cluster should have enough space to absorb the new data. Besides the standard requirements, the total free space of the target TiKV cluster should be larger than Size of data source × Number of replicas × 2.

With the default replica count of 3, this means the total free space should be at least 6 times the size of data source.

Export data

Use the mydumper tool to export data from MySQL by using the following command:

./bin/mydumper -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 -u root -t 16 -F 256 -B test -T t1,t2 --skip-tz-utc -o /data/my_database/

In this command,

  • -B test: means the data is exported from the test database.
  • -T t1,t2: means only the t1 and t2 tables are exported.
  • -t 16: means 16 threads are used to export the data.
  • -F 256: means a table is partitioned into chunks and one chunk is 256 MB.
  • --skip-tz-utc: the purpose of adding this parameter is to ignore the inconsistency of time zone setting between MySQL and the data exporting machine, and to disable automatic conversion.

If the data source consists of CSV files, see CSV support for configuration.

Deploy TiDB Lightning

This section describes two deployment methods of TiDB Lightning:

Deploy TiDB Lightning using TiDB Ansible

You can deploy TiDB Lightning using TiDB Ansible together with the deployment of the TiDB cluster itself using TiDB Ansible.

  1. Edit inventory.ini to add the addresses of the tidb-lightning and tikv-importer servers.

    ...

[importer_server]
192.168.20.9

[lightning_server]
192.168.20.10

...

  2. Configure these tools by editing the settings under group_vars/*.yml.

    • group_vars/all.yml

      ...
# The listening port of tikv-importer. Should be open to the tidb-lightning server.
tikv_importer_port: 8287
...

    • group_vars/lightning_server.yml

      ---
dummy:

# The listening port for metrics gathering. Should be open to the monitoring servers.
tidb_lightning_pprof_port: 8289

# The file path that tidb-lightning reads the data source (Mydumper SQL dump or CSV) from.
data_source_dir: "{{ deploy_dir }}/mydumper"

    • group_vars/importer_server.yml

      ---
dummy:

# The file path to store engine files. Should reside on a partition with a large capacity.
import_dir: "{{ deploy_dir }}/data.import"

  3. Deploy the cluster.

    ansible-playbook bootstrap.yml
ansible-playbook deploy.yml

  4. Mount the data source to the path specified in the data_source_dir setting.

  5. Log in to the tikv-importer server, and manually run the following command to start Importer.

    scripts/start_importer.sh

  6. Log in to the tidb-lightning server, and manually run the following command to start Lightning and import the data into the TiDB cluster.

    scripts/start_lightning.sh

  7. After completion, run scripts/stop_importer.sh on the tikv-importer server to stop Importer.

Deploy TiDB Lightning manually

Step 1: Deploy a TiDB cluster

Before importing data, you need to have a deployed TiDB cluster, with the cluster version 2.0.9 or above. It is highly recommended to use the latest version.

You can find deployment instructions in TiDB Quick Start Guide.

Step 2: Download the TiDB Lightning installation package

Refer to the TiDB enterprise tools download page to download the TiDB Lightning package (choose the same version as that of the TiDB cluster).

Step 3: Start tikv-importer

  1. Upload bin/tikv-importer from the installation package.

  2. Configure tikv-importer.toml.

    # TiKV Importer configuration file template

# Log file
log-file = "tikv-importer.log"
# Log level: trace, debug, info, warn, error, off.
log-level = "info"

[server]
# The listening address of tikv-importer. tidb-lightning needs to connect to
# this address to write data.
addr = "192.168.20.10:8287"

[metric]
# The Prometheus client push job name.
job = "tikv-importer"
# The Prometheus client push interval.
interval = "15s"
# The Prometheus Pushgateway address.
address = ""

[import]
# The directory to store engine files.
import-dir = "/mnt/ssd/data.import/"

    The above only shows the essential settings. See the Configuration section for the full list of settings.

  3. Run tikv-importer.

    nohup ./tikv-importer -C tikv-importer.toml > nohup.out &

Step 4: Start tidb-lightning

  1. Upload bin/tidb-lightning and bin/tidb-lightning-ctl from the tool set.

  2. Mount the data source onto the same machine.

  3. Configure tidb-lightning.toml. For configurations that do not appear in the template below, TiDB Lightning writes a configuration error to the log file and exits.

    [lightning]
# The concurrency number of data. It is set to the number of logical CPU
# cores by default. When deploying together with other components, you can
# set it to 75% of the size of logical CPU cores to limit the CPU usage.
# region-concurrency =

# Logging
level = "info"
file = "tidb-lightning.log"

[tikv-importer]
# The listening address of tikv-importer. Change it to the actual address.
addr = "172.16.31.10:8287"

[mydumper]
# mydumper local source data directory
data-source-dir = "/data/my_database"

[tidb]
# Configuration of any TiDB server from the cluster
host = "172.16.31.1"
port = 4000
user = "root"
password = ""
# Table schema information is fetched from TiDB via this status-port.
status-port = 10080

    The above only shows the essential settings. See the Configuration section for the full list of settings.

  4. Run tidb-lightning.

    nohup ./tidb-lightning -config tidb-lightning.toml > nohup.out &
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