CODEWITHSUNDEEP
neo4jcypher
Pieter-Jan
Pieter-Jan

Reputation: 1685

General Cypher performance

After taking part in a very interesting tutorial with a focus on Cypher, I was pleasantly surprised by the declarativeness of the Cypher query language. It's a very natural way of retrieving data from Neo4J in my opinion.

Before that, I had only used the native API. And while that is less declarative, you sort of get used to it after a while. The complex constructions are all very similar and vary only in the details for my specific project.

Still, Cypher looked more natural to me and so I am contemplating on building the second version of my application with mainly Cypher queries to interact with my database. But I encountered an issue.

There are numerous ways to convert my application into Cypher and after having tried several possible queries, all with the desired result, it appears even the fastest query is still about 20 times slower than the native API.

Now, I don't mind giving up some performance for declarativeness, but times 20 is a little bit to much for me in an application that's already struggling with performance. Is there a workaround for this issue, or do I just have to stick with the native API?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 174

Answers (1)

tstorms
tstorms

Reputation: 5001

Your conclusion sounds very familiar to me. I've also had performance issues when I used Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4j together. In the parts where performance really mattered, I switched to the core Traversal API which right now is significantly faster than an average Cypher query. This has a lot to do with the fact that there's no processing of a query and the fact that you control every aspect of the traversal. Cypher can only guess what the most optimal strategy is. I'm convinced that it will gain speed in the (near) future, but if performance really matters, I'd say stick with the core API.

Also, If you would be using java and spring data neo4j, consider using the advanced mapping mode (AspectJ) which is a lot faster than the simple mapping mode.

Upvotes: 2

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