Nippy Rocks!

We are big fans of the nippy system for freezing/thawing data. So we were pleasantly surprized with how well it performs with dataset and how easy it was to extend the dataset object to support nippy natively.

Nippy Hits One Out Of the Park

We start with a decent size gzipped tabbed-delimited file.

chrisn@chrisn-lt-01:~/dev/tech.all/tech.ml.dataset/nippy-demo$ ls -alh
total 44M
drwxrwxr-x  2 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:27 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  44M Jun 18 13:27 2010.tsv.gz

user> (def ds-2010 (time (ds/->dataset
                          "nippy-demo/2010.tsv.gz"
                          {:parser-fn {"date" [:packed-local-date "yyyy-MM-dd"]}})))
"Elapsed time: 8588.080218 msecs"
#'user/ds-2010
user> ;;rename column names so the tables print nicely
user> (def ds-2010
        (ds/select-columns ds-2010
                           (->> (ds/column-names ds-2010)
                                (map (fn [oldname]
                                       [oldname (.replace ^String oldname "_" "-")]))
                                (into {}))))
user> ds-2010
nippy-demo/2010.tsv.gz [2769708 12]:

|    low | comp-name-2 |   high | currency-code |  comp-name | m-ticker | ticker |  close |         volume | exchange |       date |   open |
|-------:|-------------|-------:|---------------|------------|----------|--------|-------:|---------------:|----------|------------|-------:|
|        |             |        |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 48.365 |                |     NYSE | 2010-01-01 |        |
| 49.355 |             | 51.065 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 51.065 | 1.10618840E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-01-08 | 49.385 |
|        |             |        |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 46.895 |                |     NYSE | 2010-01-18 |        |
| 39.904 |             | 41.854 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 40.624 | 1.46292500E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-01-26 | 40.354 |
| 40.294 |             | 41.674 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 40.474 | 1.20107520E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-03 | 40.804 |
| 39.304 |             | 40.504 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 39.844 | 1.46702890E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-09 | 40.084 |
| 39.574 |             | 40.264 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 39.844 | 1.53728400E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-12 | 39.994 |
| 40.324 |             | 41.104 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 40.624 | 7.72947100E+06 |     NYSE | 2010-02-22 | 41.044 |
| 39.664 |             | 40.564 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 39.724 | 1.08365810E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-03-02 | 40.234 |

Our 44MB gzipped tsv produced 2.7 million rows and 12 columns.

Let's check the ram usage:

user> (require '[clj-memory-meter.core :as mm])
nil
user> (mm/measure ds-2010)
"121.5 MB"

Now, let's save to an uncompressed nippy file:

user> (require '[tech.io :as io])
nil
user> (time (io/put-nippy! "nippy-demo/2010.nippy" ds-2010))
"Elapsed time: 14500.585386 msecs"
nil

That took a bit. It could probably be optimized or parallelized if necessary. What is the file size?

chrisn@chrisn-lt-01:~/dev/tech.all/tech.ml.dataset/nippy-demo$ ls -alh
total 95M
drwxrwxr-x  2 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:36 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  51M Jun 18 13:38 2010.nippy
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  44M Jun 18 13:27 2010.tsv.gz

Not bad, just a slight bit larger.

The load performance, however, is spectacular:

user> (def loaded-2010 (time (io/get-nippy "nippy-demo/2010.nippy")))
"Elapsed time: 314.502715 msecs"
#'user/loaded-2010
user> (mm/measure loaded-2010)
"93.9 MB"
user> loaded-2010
nippy-demo/2010.tsv.gz [2769708 12]:

|    low | comp-name-2 |   high | currency-code |  comp-name | m-ticker | ticker |  close |         volume | exchange |       date |   open |
|-------:|-------------|-------:|---------------|------------|----------|--------|-------:|---------------:|----------|------------|-------:|
|        |             |        |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 48.365 |                |     NYSE | 2010-01-01 |        |
| 49.355 |             | 51.065 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 51.065 | 1.10618840E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-01-08 | 49.385 |
|        |             |        |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 46.895 |                |     NYSE | 2010-01-18 |        |
| 39.904 |             | 41.854 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 40.624 | 1.46292500E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-01-26 | 40.354 |
| 40.294 |             | 41.674 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 40.474 | 1.20107520E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-03 | 40.804 |
| 39.304 |             | 40.504 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 39.844 | 1.46702890E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-09 | 40.084 |
| 39.574 |             | 40.264 |           USD | ALCOA CORP |      AA2 |     AA | 39.844 | 1.53728400E+07 |     NYSE | 2010-02-12 | 39.994 |

It takes 8 seconds to load the tsv. It takes 315 milliseconds to load the nippy! That is great :-).

The resulting dataset is somewhat smaller in memory. This is because when we parse a dataset we uses fastutil lists and append elements to them and then return a dataset that uses those lists as the column storage mechanism. Those lists have a bit more capacity than absolutely necessary.

When we save the data, we convert the data into base java/clojure datastructures such as primitive arrays. This is what makes things smaller: converting from a list with a bit of extra capacity allocated to an exact sized array. This operation is optimized and hits System/arraycopy under the covers as fastutil lists use arrays as the backing store and we make sure of the rest with tech.datatype.

Gzipping The Nippy

We can do a bit better. If you are really concerned about dataset size on disk, we can save out a gzipped nippy:

user> (time (io/put-nippy! (io/gzip-output-stream! "nippy-demo/2010.nippy.gz") ds-2010))
"Elapsed time: 18147.093349 msecs"
nil

This beats the gzipped tsv in terms of size by 10%:

chrisn@chrisn-lt-01:~/dev/tech.all/tech.ml.dataset/nippy-demo$ ls -alh
total 134M
drwxrwxr-x  2 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 chrisn chrisn 4.0K Jun 18 13:36 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  51M Jun 18 13:38 2010.nippy
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  40M Jun 18 13:47 2010.nippy.gz
-rw-rw-r--  1 chrisn chrisn  44M Jun 18 13:27 2010.tsv.gz

And now it takes twice the time to load:

user> (def loaded-gzipped-2010 (time (io/get-nippy (io/gzip-input-stream "nippy-demo/2010.nippy.gz"))))
"Elapsed time: 680.165118 msecs"
#'user/loaded-gzipped-2010
user> (mm/measure loaded-gzipped-2010)
"93.9 MB"

You can probably handle load times in the 700ms range if you have a strong reason to have data compressed on disc.

Simple Implementation

Our implementation of save/load for this pathway goes through two public functions:

• dataset->data - Convert a dataset into a pure clojure/java datastructure suitable for serialization. Data is in arrays and string tables have been slightly deconstructed.

• data->dataset - Given a data-description of a dataset create a new dataset. This is mainly a zero copy operation so it should be quite quick.

Near those functions you can see how easy it was to implement direct nippy support for the dataset object itself. Really nice, Nippy is truly a great library :-).