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Best practices for Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK

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APPLIES TO: NoSQL

This article walks through the best practices for using the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK. Following these practices, will help improve your latency, availability, and boost overall performance.

Watch the video below to learn more about using the .NET SDK from an Azure Cosmos DB engineer!

Checklist

Checked Subject Details/Links
SDK Version Always using the latest version of the Azure Cosmos DB SDK available for optimal performance.
Singleton Client Use a single instance of CosmosClient for the lifetime of your application for better performance.
Regions Make sure to run your application in the same Azure region as your Azure Cosmos DB account, whenever possible to reduce latency. Enable 2-4 regions and replicate your accounts in multiple regions for best availability. For production workloads, enable service-managed failover. In the absence of this configuration, the account will experience loss of write availability for all the duration of the write region outage, as manual failover won't succeed due to lack of region connectivity. To learn how to add multiple regions using the .NET SDK visit here
Availability and Failovers Set the ApplicationPreferredRegions or ApplicationRegion in the v3 SDK, and the PreferredLocations in the v2 SDK using the preferred regions list. During failovers, write operations are sent to the current write region and all reads are sent to the first region within your preferred regions list. For more information about regional failover mechanics, see the availability troubleshooting guide.
CPU You may run into connectivity/availability issues due to lack of resources on your client machine. Monitor your CPU utilization on nodes running the Azure Cosmos DB client, and scale up/out if usage is high.
Hosting Use Windows 64-bit host processing for best performance, whenever possible. For Direct mode latency-sensitive production workloads, we highly recommend using at least 4-cores and 8-GB memory VMs whenever possible.
Connectivity Modes Use Direct mode for the best performance. For instructions on how to do this, see the V3 SDK documentation or the V2 SDK documentation.
Networking If using a virtual machine to run your application, enable Accelerated Networking on your VM to help with bottlenecks due to high traffic and reduce latency or CPU jitter. You might also want to consider using a higher end Virtual Machine where the max CPU usage is under 70%.
Ephemeral Port Exhaustion For sparse or sporadic connections, we set the IdleConnectionTimeout and PortReuseMode to PrivatePortPool. The IdleConnectionTimeout property helps control the time after which unused connections are closed. This reduces the number of unused connections. By default, idle connections are kept open indefinitely. The value set must be greater than or equal to 10 minutes. We recommended values between 20 minutes and 24 hours. The PortReuseMode property allows the SDK to use a small pool of ephemeral ports for various Azure Cosmos DB destination endpoints.
Use Async/Await Avoid blocking calls: Task.Result, Task.Wait, and Task.GetAwaiter().GetResult(). The entire call stack is asynchronous in order to benefit from async/await patterns. Many synchronous blocking calls lead to Thread Pool starvation and degraded response times.
End-to-End Timeouts To get end-to-end timeouts, you need to use both RequestTimeout and CancellationToken parameters. For more details visit our timeout troubleshooting guide.
Retry Logic For more information on which errors to retry on and which ones are retried by SDKs, see design guide. For accounts configured with multiple regions, there are some scenarios where the SDK will automatically retry on other regions. For .NET specific implementation details visit the SDK source repository.
Caching database/collection names Retrieve the names of your databases and containers from configuration or cache them on start. Calls like ReadDatabaseAsync or ReadDocumentCollectionAsync and CreateDatabaseQuery or CreateDocumentCollectionQuery will result in metadata calls to the service, which consume from the system-reserved RU limit. CreateIfNotExist should also only be used once for setting up the database. Overall, these operations should be performed infrequently.
Bulk Support In scenarios where you may not need to optimize for latency, we recommend enabling Bulk support for dumping large volumes of data.
Parallel Queries The Azure Cosmos DB SDK supports running queries in parallel for better latency and throughput on your queries. We recommend setting the MaxConcurrency property within the QueryRequestsOptions to the number of partitions you have. If you aren't aware of the number of partitions, start by using int.MaxValue, which will give you the best latency. Then decrease the number until it fits the resource restrictions of the environment to avoid high CPU issues. Also, set the MaxBufferedItemCount to the expected number of results returned to limit the number of prefetched results.
Performance Testing Backoffs When performing testing on your application, you should implement backoffs at RetryAfter intervals. Respecting the backoff helps ensure that you spend a minimal amount of time waiting between retries.
Indexing The Azure Cosmos DB indexing policy also allows you to specify which document paths to include or exclude from indexing by using indexing paths (IndexingPolicy.IncludedPaths and IndexingPolicy.ExcludedPaths). Ensure that you exclude unused paths from indexing for faster writes. For more information on how to create indexes using the SDK, see performance tips .NET SDK v3.
Document Size The request charge of a specified operation correlates directly to the size of the document. We recommend reducing the size of your documents as operations on large documents cost more than operations on smaller documents.
Increase the number of threads/tasks Because calls to Azure Cosmos DB are made over the network, you might need to vary the degree of concurrency of your requests so that the client application spends minimal time waiting between requests. For example, if you're using the .NET Task Parallel Library, create on the order of hundreds of tasks that read from or write to Azure Cosmos DB.
Enabling Query Metrics For more logging of your backend query executions, you can enable SQL Query Metrics using our .NET SDK. For more information on how to collect SQL Query Metrics, see query metrics and performance.
SDK Logging Log SDK diagnostics for outstanding scenarios, such as exceptions or when requests go beyond an expected latency.
DefaultTraceListener The DefaultTraceListener poses performance issues on production environments causing high CPU and I/O bottlenecks. Make sure you're using the latest SDK versions or remove the DefaultTraceListener from your application
Avoid using any special characters in identifiers Some characters are restricted and cannot be used in some identifiers: '/', '\', '?', '#'. The general recommendation is to not use any special characters in identifiers like database name, collection name, item id, or partition key to avoid any unexpected behavior.

Capture diagnostics

All the responses in the SDK, including CosmosException, have a Diagnostics property. This property records all the information related to the single request, including if there were retries or any transient failures.

The diagnostics are returned as a string. The string changes with each version, as it's improved for troubleshooting different scenarios. With each version of the SDK, the string will have breaking changes to the formatting. Don't parse the string to avoid breaking changes. The following code sample shows how to read diagnostic logs by using the .NET SDK:

try
{
    ItemResponse<Book> response = await this.Container.CreateItemAsync<Book>(item: testItem);
    if (response.Diagnostics.GetClientElapsedTime() > ConfigurableSlowRequestTimeSpan)
    {
        // Log the response.Diagnostics.ToString() and add any additional info necessary to correlate to other logs 
    }
}
catch (CosmosException cosmosException)
{
    // Log the full exception including the stack trace with: cosmosException.ToString()
    
    // The Diagnostics can be logged separately if required with: cosmosException.Diagnostics.ToString()
}

// When using Stream APIs
ResponseMessage response = await this.Container.CreateItemStreamAsync(partitionKey, stream);
if (response.Diagnostics.GetClientElapsedTime() > ConfigurableSlowRequestTimeSpan || !response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
{
    // Log the diagnostics and add any additional info necessary to correlate to other logs with: response.Diagnostics.ToString()
}

Best practices for HTTP connections

The .NET SDK uses HttpClient to perform HTTP requests regardless of the connectivity mode configured. In Direct mode HTTP is used for metadata operations and in Gateway mode it's used for both data plane and metadata operations. One of the fundamentals of HttpClient is to make sure the HttpClient can react to DNS changes on your account by customizing the pooled connection lifetime. As long as pooled connections are kept open, they don't react to DNS changes. This setting forces pooled connections to be closed periodically, ensuring that your application reacts to DNS changes. Our recommendation is that you customize this value according to your connectivity mode and workload to balance the performance impact of frequently creating new connections, with needing to react to DNS changes (availability). A 5-minute value would be a good start that can be increased if it's impacting performance particularly for Gateway mode.

You can inject your custom HttpClient through CosmosClientOptions.HttpClientFactory, for example:

// Use a Singleton instance of the SocketsHttpHandler, which you can share across any HttpClient in your application
SocketsHttpHandler socketsHttpHandler = new SocketsHttpHandler();
// Customize this value based on desired DNS refresh timer
socketsHttpHandler.PooledConnectionLifetime = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);

CosmosClientOptions cosmosClientOptions = new CosmosClientOptions()
{
    // Pass your customized SocketHttpHandler to be used by the CosmosClient
    // Make sure `disposeHandler` is `false`
    HttpClientFactory = () => new HttpClient(socketsHttpHandler, disposeHandler: false)
};

// Use a Singleton instance of the CosmosClient
return new CosmosClient("<connection-string>", cosmosClientOptions);

If you use .NET dependency injection, you can simplify the Singleton process:

SocketsHttpHandler socketsHttpHandler = new SocketsHttpHandler();
// Customize this value based on desired DNS refresh timer
socketsHttpHandler.PooledConnectionLifetime = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);
// Registering the Singleton SocketsHttpHandler lets you reuse it across any HttpClient in your application
services.AddSingleton<SocketsHttpHandler>(socketsHttpHandler);

// Use a Singleton instance of the CosmosClient
services.AddSingleton<CosmosClient>(serviceProvider =>
{
    SocketsHttpHandler socketsHttpHandler = serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<SocketsHttpHandler>();
    CosmosClientOptions cosmosClientOptions = new CosmosClientOptions()
    {
        HttpClientFactory = () => new HttpClient(socketsHttpHandler, disposeHandler: false)
    };

    return new CosmosClient("<connection-string>", cosmosClientOptions);
});

Best practices when using Gateway mode

Increase System.Net MaxConnections per host when you use Gateway mode. Azure Cosmos DB requests are made over HTTPS/REST when you use Gateway mode. They're subject to the default connection limit per hostname or IP address. You might need to set MaxConnections to a higher value (from 100 through 1,000) so that the client library can use multiple simultaneous connections to Azure Cosmos DB. In .NET SDK 1.8.0 and later, the default value for ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit is 50. To change the value, you can set CosmosClientOptions.GatewayModeMaxConnectionLimit to a higher value.

Best practices for write-heavy workloads

For workloads that have heavy create payloads, set the EnableContentResponseOnWrite request option to false. The service will no longer return the created or updated resource to the SDK. Normally, because the application has the object that's being created, it doesn't need the service to return it. The header values are still accessible, like a request charge. Disabling the content response can help improve performance, because the SDK no longer needs to allocate memory or serialize the body of the response. It also reduces the network bandwidth usage to further help performance.

Important

Setting EnableContentResponseOnWrite to false will also disable the response from a trigger operation.

Best practices for multi-tenant applications

Applications that distribute usage across multiple tenants where each tenant is represented by a different database, container, or partition key within the same Azure Cosmos DB account should use a single client instance. A single client instance can interact with all the databases, containers, and partition keys within an account, and it's best practice to use the singleton pattern.

However, when each tenant is represented by a different Azure Cosmos DB account, it's required to create a separate client instance per account. The singleton pattern still applies for each client (one client for each account for the lifetime of the application), but if the volume of tenants is high, the number of clients can be difficult to manage. Connections can increase beyond the limits of the compute environment and cause connectivity issues.

It's recommended in these cases to:

  • Understand the limitations of the compute environment (CPU and connection resources). We recommend using VMs with at least 4-cores and 8-GB memory whenever possible.
  • Based on the limitations of the compute environment, determine the number of client instances (and therefore number of tenants) a single compute instance can handle. You can estimate the number of connections that will be opened per client depending on the connection mode chosen.
  • Evaluate tenant distribution across instances. If each compute instance can successfully handle a certain limited amount of tenants, load balancing and routing of tenants to different compute instances would allow for scaling as the number of tenants grow.
  • For sparse workloads, consider using a Least Frequently Used cache as the structure to hold the client instances and dispose clients for tenants that haven't been accessed within a time window. One option in .NET is MemoryCacheEntryOptions, where RegisterPostEvictionCallback can be used to dispose inactive clients and SetSlidingExpiration can be used to define the maximum time to hold inactive connections.
  • Evaluate using Gateway mode to reduce the number of network connections.
  • When using Direct mode consider adjusting CosmosClientOptions.IdleTcpConnectionTimeout and CosmosClientOptions.PortReuseMode on the direct mode configuration to close unused connections and keep the volume of connections under control.

Next steps

For a sample application that's used to evaluate Azure Cosmos DB for high-performance scenarios on a few client machines, see Performance and scale testing with Azure Cosmos DB.

To learn more about designing your application for scale and high performance, see Partitioning and scaling in Azure Cosmos DB.

Trying to do capacity planning for a migration to Azure Cosmos DB? You can use information about your existing database cluster for capacity planning.