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Map-Reduce Concurrency

Note

Aggregation Pipeline as an Alternative to Map-Reduce

Starting in MongoDB 5.0, map-reduce is deprecated:

  • Instead of map-reduce, you should use an aggregation pipeline. Aggregation pipelines provide better performance and usability than map-reduce.

  • You can rewrite map-reduce operations using aggregation pipeline stages, such as $group, $merge, and others.

  • For map-reduce operations that require custom functionality, you can use the $accumulator and $function aggregation operators, available starting in version 4.4. You can use those operators to define custom aggregation expressions in JavaScript.

For examples of aggregation pipeline alternatives to map-reduce, see:

The map-reduce operation is composed of many tasks, including reads from the input collection, executions of the map function, executions of the reduce function, writes to a temporary collection during processing, and writes to the output collection.

During the operation, map-reduce takes the following locks:

  • The read phase takes a read lock. It yields every 100 documents.

  • The insert into the temporary collection takes a write lock for a single write.

  • If the output collection does not exist, the creation of the output collection takes a write lock.

  • If the output collection exists, then the output actions (i.e. merge, replace, reduce) take a write lock. This write lock is global, and blocks all operations on the mongod instance.

Note

The final write lock during post-processing makes the results appear atomically. However, output actions merge and reduce may take minutes to process. For the merge and reduce, the nonAtomic flag is available, which releases the lock between writing each output document. Starting in MongoDB 4.2, explicitly setting nonAtomic: false is deprecated. See the db.collection.mapReduce() reference for more information.