Using Virtuoso as an alternate triple store for a VIVO instance
Creators: name: Albert, Paul
name: Chan, Eliza
name: Prakesh Adekkanattu
name: Mansour, Mohammad
Publisher: name: VIVO
Year: 2015
Subjects: subject: Information Systems
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: Library and Information Studies
subject: FOS: Media and communications
subject: FOS: Media and communications

description: Background: For some time, the VIVO for Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) had struggled with both unacceptable page load times and unreliable uptime. With some individual profiles containing upwards of 800 publications, WCMC VIVO has relatively large profiles, but no profile was so large that it could account for this performance. The WCMC VIVO Implementation Team explored a number of options for improving performance including caching, better hardware, query optimization, limiting user access to large pages, using another instance of Tomcat, throttling bots, and blocking IP's issuing too many requests. But none of these avenues were fruitful. <br><br>Analysis of triple stores: With the 1.7 version, VIVO ships with the Jena SDB triple store, but the SDB version of Jena is no longer supported by its developers. In April, we reviewed various published analyses and benchmarks suggesting there were alternatives to Jena such as Virtuoso that perform better than even Jena's successor, TDB. In particular, the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark v. 3.1[1] showed that Virtuoso had the strongest performance compared to the other data stores measured including BigData, BigOwlim, and Jena TDB. In addition, Virtuoso is used on dbpedia.org which serves up 3 billion triples compared to the only 12 million with WCMC's VIVO site. Whereas Jena SDB stores its triples in a MySQL database, Virtuoso manages its in a binary file. The software is available in open source and commercial editions. <br> <br>Configuration: In late 2014, we installed Virtuoso on a local machine and loaded data from our production VIVO. Some queries completed in about 10% of the time as compared to our production VIVO. However, we noticed that the listview queries invoked whenever profile pages were loaded were still slow. After soliciting feedback from members of both the Virtuoso and VIVO communities, we modified these queries to rely on the OPTIONAL instead of UNION construct. This modification, which wasn't possible in a Jena SDB environment, reduced by eight-fold the number of queries that the application makes of the triple store. About four or five additional steps were required for VIVO and Virtuoso to work optimally with one another; these are documented in the VIVO Duraspace wiki. <br><br>Results: On March 31, WCMC launched Virtuoso in its production environment. According to our instance of New Relic, VIVO has an average page load of about four seconds and 99% uptime, both of which are dramatic improvements. There are opportunities for further tuning: the four second average includes pages such as the visualizations as well as pages served up to logged in users, which are slower than other types of pages. <br><br>[1] http://wifo5-03.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/bizer/berlinsparqlbenchmark/results/V7/#comparison