This nugget was discovered by Tal, who was measuring write throughput and noticed that a lot of the time wasn’t being handled in the proper code path, but on something on the side that seemed… off.

prefetchingQueue.Aggregate(0, (x,c) => x + SelectSerializedSizeOnDiskIfNotNull(c)) > context.Configuration.AvailableMemoryForRaisingBatchSizeLimit)

This piece of code is responsible for heuristics deep inside the bowels of RavenDB. In fact, it is the piece that decide whatever we have enough memory to index directly from memory or do we need to start dumping stuff and pay the I/O cost of them later.

As a result, this piece of code is called once for every document save. It was also quite wildly inefficient. The Aggregate implementation was pretty much as you imagined it, and it took three times as much time as actually process the rest of the request. The underlying reason was that we kept doing a foreach and a delegate invocation on each an every call. The more documents we had coming in, the more work we had to do. Shlemiel the painter at his best.

We first saw a major improvement by just removing the Aggregate() call in favor of a purpose built function that summed all those details for us directly. Next, we changed things so instead of doing O(N) work per request, we could do an O(1) work by doing this work one bit at a time and aggregating it on the fly. So whenever we added or removed something to the prefetching queue, we would also make sure to add / remove that from the global tally.

Once that is done, we saw almost 18% improvement in high write scenarios, because we weren’t just busy counting how much stuff we have in memory to figure out if we can put things in memory.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that the work throughout was done using a profiler (in our case, the excellent dotTrace) because if dotTrace wouldn’t have point a big finger at this line of code, we would have never have considered this to be problematic.