TiDB Lightning Deployment

This document describes the hardware requirements of TiDB Lightning using the Local-backend, and how to deploy it manually.

Notes

Before starting TiDB Lightning, note that:

• If tidb-lightning crashes, the cluster is left in "import mode". Forgetting to switch back to "normal mode" can lead to a high amount of uncompacted data on the TiKV cluster, and cause abnormally high CPU usage and stall. You can manually switch the cluster back to "normal mode" via the tidb-lightning-ctl tool:

  bin/tidb-lightning-ctl --switch-mode=normal
  

Hardware requirements

tidb-lightning is a resource-intensive program. It is recommended to deploy it as follows.

• 32+ logical cores CPU
• 20GB+ memory
• An SSD large enough to store the entire data source, preferring higher read speed
• 10 Gigabit network card (capable of transferring at ≥1 GB/s)
• tidb-lightning fully consumes all CPU cores when running, and deploying on a dedicated machine is highly recommended. If not possible, tidb-lightning could be deployed together with other components like tidb-server, and the CPU usage could be limited via the region-concurrency setting.

Additionally, the target TiKV cluster should have enough space to absorb the new data. Besides the standard requirements, the total free space of the target TiKV cluster should be larger than Size of data source × Number of replicas × 2.

With the default replica count of 3, this means the total free space should be at least 6 times the size of data source.

Export data

Use the dumpling tool to export data from MySQL by using the following command:

./dumpling -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 -u root -t 16 -F 256MB -B test -f 'test.t[12]' -o /data/my_database/

In this command,

• -B test: means the data is exported from the test database.
• -f test.t[12]: means only the test.t1 and test.t2 tables are exported.
• -t 16: means 16 threads are used to export the data.
• -F 256MB: means a table is partitioned into chunks and one chunk is 256 MB.

If the data source consists of CSV files, see CSV support for configuration.

Deploy TiDB Lightning

This section describes how to deploy TiDB Lightning manually.

Deploy TiDB Lightning manually

Step 1: Deploy a TiDB cluster

Before importing data, you need to have a deployed TiDB cluster. It is highly recommended to use the latest stable version.

You can find deployment instructions in TiDB Quick Start Guide.

Step 2: Download the TiDB Lightning installation package

Refer to the Download TiDB Tools document to download the TiDB Lightning package.

Step 3: Start tidb-lightning

1. Upload bin/tidb-lightning and bin/tidb-lightning-ctl from the tool set.

2. Mount the data source onto the same machine.

3. Configure tidb-lightning.toml. For configurations that do not appear in the template below, TiDB Lightning writes a configuration error to the log file and exits.

   sorted-kv-dir sets the temporary storage directory for the sorted Key-Value files. The directory must be empty, and the storage space must be greater than the size of the dataset to be imported. See Downstream storage space requirements for details.

   [lightning]
   # The concurrency number of data. It is set to the number of logical CPU
   # cores by default. When deploying together with other components, you can
   # set it to 75% of the size of logical CPU cores to limit the CPU usage.
   # region-concurrency =
   
   # Logging
   level = "info"
   file = "tidb-lightning.log"
   
   [tikv-importer]
   # Sets the backend to the "local" mode.
   backend = "local"
   # Sets the directory of temporary local storage.
   sorted-kv-dir = "/mnt/ssd/sorted-kv-dir"
   
   [mydumper]
   # Local source data directory
   data-source-dir = "/data/my_database"
   
   [tidb]
   # Configuration of any TiDB server from the cluster
   host = "172.16.31.1"
   port = 4000
   user = "root"
   password = ""
   # Table schema information is fetched from TiDB via this status-port.
   status-port = 10080
   # An address of pd-server.
   pd-addr = "172.16.31.4:2379"
   

   The above only shows the essential settings. See the Configuration section for the full list of settings.

4. Run tidb-lightning.

   nohup ./tidb-lightning -config tidb-lightning.toml > nohup.out &
   

Upgrading TiDB Lightning

You can upgrade TiDB Lightning by replacing the binaries alone. No further configuration is needed. See FAQ for the detailed instructions of restarting TiDB Lightning.

If an import task is running, we recommend you to wait until it finishes before upgrading TiDB Lightning. Otherwise, there might be chances that you need to reimport from scratch, because there is no guarantee that checkpoints work across versions.