The Final Boss: When 80 Cores Meet the SATA Limit

Hey everyone,

For those following along with my Hive-Engine restore adventures, here is the Monday morning status report.

We threw everything at this problem to bypass the software bottlenecks.

• The Triple Pincer: Splitting the restore into three simultaneous streams to break collection locks.
• The Hardware: 80 CPU Cores and a brand new dedicated 2TB SSD.

The Good News

The strategy worked beautifully for 90% of the database.

The hsc.chain collection, usually a beast that takes days, finished in just a few hours. The "everything else" stream (tokens, market history, balances) finished even faster. My CPU cores were fully saturated, pigz was screaming, and the data flew onto the disk at nearly 200,000 inserts per second.

We proved that you can brute-force MongoDB into submission if you attack it from enough angles.

The Bad News (The "Transactions" Reality Check)

Then we hit hsc.transactions.

This collection isn't just "big." It contains the record of every single thing that has ever happened on Hive Engine. We are talking billions of records. Small, tiny records that require massive amounts of random I/O to index and store.

Right now, my dashboard shows the sobering reality:

• CPU Usage: ~5% (Bored)
• Disk Utilization: 100.0% (Screaming)

We have officially moved the bottleneck from the software (MongoDB locks) to the hardware (SATA Physics).

I mentioned earlier that I moved /var to a dedicated 2TB SSD. It’s a solid drive, but it is SATA, not NVMe. That means I am capped at roughly 550 MB/s sequential write, and significantly less for the random 4K writes that MongoDB indices demand.

My 80 cores are ready to work, but they are sitting around drinking coffee because the SATA bus simply cannot swallow the data any faster. There is no magic config flag, no kernel tweak, and no script that can force a SATA cable to transmit light speeds.

The Verdict

The restore is proceeding, but we are now in the "patience" phase.

The "Triple Pincer" proved that you can optimize the restore process significantly, but eventually, you will always hit the physical limits of your storage media. If this were an NVMe drive, we’d likely be done by now. But with SATA, we wait.

I’m letting it ride. The node will be ready when the copper wire decides it's ready.

Status: Waiting on I/O.
Mood: Accepting of Physics.

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM