Transparent failover and restore?

Josh Berkus josh at agliodbs.com
Mon Dec 20 11:03:26 PST 2004


Greg,

> My original point was that the at least some of the stability we have
> seen with the memcache server is due in part to its simplistic design
> (server hashing handled by clients, lack of server side state
> management).  As software complexity grows, the chance for bugs,
> instability and errors grows with it.  I like production services to
> be simple, modular, and stable.

Which is a good reason to make the redundancy optional, but not to
oppose it.   It's also a good focus for the redundancy; keep is as
simple as possible.

>From my perspective (I used memcached as an accessory to a database, so
it only holds quickly restorable data) the problem with taking a server
offline is not primarily one of re-building the cache data, but rather
one of propagating the server lists.   To give you an example:

For a proposed project, we have 5 PostgreSQL database servers, each one
running a 250MB instance of Memcached to hold session management
information.   These servers are replicated by Slony, allowing us to
take them offline one at a time to upgrade them to PostgreSQL 8.0
(slony supports this).   Our pooling component, C-JDBC, dynamically
recognizes which servers are not responding and queries the remaining 4
servers while the 5th is down.

But memcached doesn't.  In fact, due to the way hash keys are handled,
not only do we have to propogate new server lists to each one of 8
webservers, but the entire cache is invalidated and needs to be rebuild
from database for all 4 machines.   Then when the 5th machine is back
online, we have to rebuild the entire cache again.

This is silly.  If C-JDBC can dynamically keep track of servers in the
pool with minor overhead, why can't we make a pooling daemon for
memcached?  Then we could simply copy the cache on the 5th machine to a
new cahce on the 4th machine, and tell the server daemon to redirect
while we upgrade the 5th machine.  Each cache machine can run a server
daemon with minor resources which can be easily updated, in batch mode,
via a network command.

If people who don't need such pooling don't want the overhead, then
they can continue to "direct write" to the cache the way it works now.

--Josh Berkus



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