Avinash
The following protocol will help you fix the observed misbehavior. As
Flavio points out, you cannot rely on the order of nodes in getChildren,
you must use an intrinsic property of each node to determine who is the
leader. The protocol devised by Runping Qi and described here will do
that.
First of all, when you create child nodes of the node that holds the
leadership bids, you must create them with the EPHEMERAL and SEQUENCE
flag. ZooKeeper guarantees to give you an ephemeral node named uniquely
and with a sequence number larger by at least one than any previously
created node in the sequence. You provide a prefix, like "L_" or your
own choice, and ZooKeeper creates nodes named "L_23", "L_24", etc. The
sequence number starts at 0 and increases monotonously.
Once you've placed your leadership bid, you search backwards from the
sequence number of *your* node to see if there are any preceding (in
terms of the sequence number) nodes. When you find one, you place a
watch on it and wait for it to disappear. When you get the watch
notification, you search again, until you do not find a preceding node,
then you know you're the leader. This protocol guarantees that there is
at any time only one node that thinks it is the leader. But it does not
disseminate information about who is the leader. If you want everyone to
know who is the leader, you can have an additional Znode whose value is
the name of the current leader (or some identifying information on how
to contact the leader, etc.). Note that this cannot be done atomically,
so by the time other nodes find out who the leader is, the leadership
may already have passed on to a different node.
Flavio
Might it make sense to provide a standardized implementation of leader
election in the library code in Java?
--Jacob
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Flavio Junqueira
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 1:02 AM
To: zookeeper-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Zookeeper-user] Leader election
Hi Avinash, getChildren returns a list in lexicographic order, so if you
are updating the children of the election node concurrently, then you
may get a different first node with different clients. If you are using
the sequence flag to create nodes, then you may consider stripping the
prefix of the node name and using the sufix value to determine order.
Hope it helps.
-Flavio
----- Original Message ----
From: Avinash Lakshman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: zookeeper-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 7:20:06 AM
Subject: [Zookeeper-user] Leader election
Hi
I am trying to elect leader among 50 nodes. There is always one odd guy
who seems to think that someone else distinct from what some other nodes
see as leader. Could someone please tell me what is wrong with the
following code for leader election:
public void electLeader()
{
ZooKeeper zk =
StorageService.instance().getZooKeeperHandle();
String path = "/Leader";
try
{
String createPath = path + "/L-";
LeaderElector.createLock_.lock();
while( true )
{
/* Get all znodes under the Leader znode */
List<String> values = zk.getChildren(path, false);
/*
* Get the first znode and if it is the
* pathCreated created above then the data
* in that znode is the leader's identity.
*/
if ( leader_ == null )
{
leader_ = new AtomicReference<EndPoint>(
EndPoint.fromBytes( zk.getData(path + "/" + values.get(0), false, null)
) );
}
else
{
leader_.set( EndPoint.fromBytes( zk.getData(path
+ "/" + values .get(0), false, null) ) );
/* Disseminate the state as to who the leader
is. */
onLeaderElection();
}
logger_.debug("Elected leader is " + leader_ + " @
znode " + ( path + "/" + values.get(0) ) );
Collections.sort(values);
/* We need only the last portion of this znode */
String[] peices = pathCreated_.split("/");
int index = Collections.binarySearch(values,
peices[peices.length - 1]);
if ( index > 0 )
{
String pathToCheck = path + "/" +
values.get(index - 1);
Stat stat = zk.exists(pathToCheck, true);
if ( stat != null )
{
logger_.debug("Awaiting my turn ...");
condition_.await();
logger_.debug("Checking to see if leader is
around ...");
}
}
else
{
break;
}
}
}
catch ( InterruptedException ex )
{
logger_.warn(LogUtil.throwableToString(ex));
}
catch ( KeeperException ex )
{
logger_.warn(LogUtil.throwableToString(ex));
}
finally
{
LeaderElector.createLock_.unlock();
}
}
}
Thanks
Avinash
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