Speeding Up Cold Starts with the Aerospike Shared-Memory Tool (ASMT)

Overview

The Aerospike Shared-Memory Tool (ASMT) backs up and restores Aerospike shared memory segments to disk, enabling warm restart across reboots in an Aerospike Database Enterprise Edition (EE) cluster. The tool backs up primary indexes, secondary indexes, and data stages from the server node (host machine) memory to the file system. After the backup, the server node can reboot without the time-consuming stage of rebuilding the indexes.

info

This tool is not intended for namespaces where the primary index is configured on Persistent Memory or Flash (SSDs), as those would persist upon an instance restart.

Warm restart with asmt

Follow this process to restart the machine hosting an Aerospike Database cluster node:

1. Cleanly shut down the Aerospike cluster node process (asd).
2. Use asmt to save the node's primary index by copying it from shared memory to files on your file system.
3. Reboot the server.
4. After the server restarts, use asmt to restore the primary index from its copy on file system to shared memory.
5. Perform a cold start of your Aerospike node.

This restart is faster than before because the cluster finds the index in shared memory and does not have to reconstruct it. The alternative, reconstructing the primary index from the drives, is a much longer process, and requires the Aerospike cluster node to scan all the storage devices.

caution

You cannot use ASMT while the Aerospike Database process is running.

Refer to the following knowledge base articles:

• FAQ - ASMT Tool
• How to speed up cold start