When GC is run, it does lookups in the LSM tree. We first do a small number of lookups to sample the file -- if the sample indicates that the data can be GCed (

When GC is run, it does lookups in the LSM tree. We first do a small number of lookups to sample the file -- if the sample indicates that the data can be GCed (based on the discard ratio), only then does the GC go over the entire file. In addition, Badger limits the number of key-values per log file, by default to 1M (ValueLogMaxEntries), which was a sweet spot we found. You can run GC during periods of low activity. We run it periodically in Dgraph and don't see any negative impact on performance. Again, because LSM tree is typically small and memory mapping does a good job of serving most lookups from RAM. Badger is an embedded KV DB. All the distribution of data happens a layer above Badger. It does not support that natively. You could use either Etcd for that, or TiKV for that.