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Couchbase Compression using Snappier

Using compression for key/value operations can improve performance by reducing the amount of data sent and received over the network. It is trading CPU cycles for reducing network utilization. In some cloud environments it may also reduce network-related costs.

For more details, see https://docs.couchbase.com/server/current/learn/buckets-memory-and-storage/compression.html.

The Couchbase .NET SDK 3.x doesn't include built-in support for compression. This is because Couchbase uses Snappy for its compression algorithm, which historically hasn't had a great cross-platform implementation in .NET. Since version 3.1, the Couchbase .NET SDK does support extensibility points to add an external implementation of Snappy.

Couchbase.Extensions.Compression.Snappier

The Couchbase.Extensions.Compression.Snappier is a simple adapter library that wires the Couchbase SDK to the Snappier library. This is a .NET port of the C++ Snappy compression algorithm. It uses C# only, without P/Invoke to native code, to maintain full compatibilty with all CPU architectures and operating systems. In order to deliver near C++ performance, it uses pointer arithmetic and hardware intrinsics.

Due to the high performance requirements of Couchbase key/value operations, it is recommend that this adapter only be used with .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5.0 and later. Earlier versions of the .NET runtime do not support the required hardware intrinsics to get all of the performance benefits. It is also recommended that the application be run in x64 on an Intel or AMD processor, not ARM. However, older versions of the .NET runtime and other architectures like x86 and ARM are supported, they will just have a CPU performance penalty.

Configuring Snappier

To enable Snappier compression, simply call WithSnappierCompression on your ClusterOptions object before connecting your cluster.

var options = new ClusterOptions()
    .WithCredentials("Administrator", "password")
    .WithSnappierCompression();

var cluster = await Cluster.ConnectAsync("couchbase://localhost", options);

This will negotiate compression with the server during bootstrap and apply compression to any requests or responses which support it.

The compression settings may be further configured if advanced tuning is required:

options.Compression = true;          // Default is true, setting to false disables even if WithSnappierCompression is called
options.CompressionMinRatio = 0.90f; // Default is 0.83 == 83%, the compressed result is discarded if this ratio is not acheived
options.CompressionMinSize = 128;    // Default is 32 bytes, docs smaller than this never try to compress on mutations