Switching Storage Engines¶

By default, Percona Server for MongoDB runs with WiredTiger. There is also the original MMAPv1 storage engine, as well as optional Percona Memory Engine and MongoRocks storage engines to choose from. Each one is designed for specific purposes and workloads.

You can select a storage engine using the --storageEngine command-line option when you start mongod. Alternatively, you can set the storage.engine variable in the configuration file (by default, /etc/mongod.conf).

Data created by one storage engine is not compatible with other storage engines, because each one has its own data model. When changing the storage engine, you have to do one of the following:

• If you simply want to temporarily test a storage engine, you can change to a different data directory using the --dbpath command-line option:

  $ service mongod stop
  $ mongod --storageEngine rocksdb --dbpath <dataDirForRocksDB>
  

  Note

  Make sure that the user running mongod has read and write permissons for the new data directory.

• If you want to permanently switch to a different storage engine and do not have any valuable data in your database, clean out the default data directory and edit the configuration file:

  $ service mongod stop
  $ rm -rf /var/lib/mongodb/*
  $ sed -i '/engine: \*rocksdb/s/#//g' /etc/mongod.conf
  $ service mongod start
  

• If there is data that you want to migrate and make compatible with the new storage engine, use the mongodump and mongorestore utilities:

  $ mongodump --out <dumpDir>
  $ service mongod stop
  $ rm -rf /var/lib/mongodb/*
  $ sed -i '/engine: \*rocksdb/s/#//g' /etc/mongod.conf
  $ service mongod start
  $ mongorestore <dumpDir>
  

Storage Engine Configuration Templates¶

The default configuration file provided with Percona Server for MongoDB (/etc/mongod.conf) contains templates for running any of the bundled storage engine. The suggested values do not cover all cases, but they are a good reference point to start customizing the configuration. The following hints may help you:

• On very high volume systems, you may need to increase the maximum number of concurrent transactions for WiredTiger and Percona Memory Engine (default is 128). These are controlled using the following MongoDB parameters:
  • wiredTigerConcurrentReadTransactions
  • wiredTigerConcurrentWriteTransactions
• On systems with more than roughly 24,000 collections running MMAPv1, increase the storage.mmapv1.nsSize variable.
• Also for MMAPv1 you can set storage.mmapv1.smallFiles to true to use a smaller default file size, if you have a large number of databases that each holds a small amount of data.
• The storage.rocksdb.counters variable must be set to true if you are running MongoRocks and want to use Percona Monitoring and Management.
• The default maximum internal cache size that WiredTiger uses is the larger of either:
  • 50% of RAM minus 1 GB
  • 256 MB
• The default maximum internal cache size that MongoRocks uses is 30% of RAM.