IOPS or Throughput

Question

If IOPS is the bottleneck, I can easily upgrade to Provisioned IOPS. But if network latency is the issue, I will need to redesign our load jobs to load raw data from EC2 instances instead of our remote servers, which will take some time to implement.

Determining Write Bottleneck in Amazon RDS Instance. We have nightly load jobs that writes several hundred thousand records to an Mysql reporting database running in Amazon RDS.

The load jobs are taking several hours to complete, but I am having a hard time figuring out where the bottleneck is.

The instance is currently running with General Purpose (SSD) storage. By looking at the cloudwatch metrics, it appears I am averaging less than 50 IOPS for the last week. However, Network Receive Throughput is less than 0.2 MB/sec.

Is there anyway to tell from this data if I am being bottlenecked by network latency (we are currently loading the data from a remote server...this will change eventually) or by Write IOPS?

Any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

Configure your database driver to print statistics about the database workload. This might inform you that you are issuing far more queries than you would expect. A very quick test is to buy provisioned IOPS, but be careful as you may get fewer than you do currently during a burst.

Another quick means to determine your bottleneck is to profile your job execution application with a profiler that understands your database driver. If you're using Java, JProfiler will show the characteristics of your job and it's use of the database.