Another option would be to never write the wal locally: in nearly all
cases it won't be used as it's on the dead box. And then the recovery
would be directed by the NN to a dead DN in a single box failure. And
we would have 3 copies instead of 2, increasing global reliability...

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 12:16 AM, N Keywal <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Todd,
>
> Do you think the change would be too intrusive for hdfs? I aggree,
> there are many less critical components in hadoop :-). I was hoping
> that this state could be internal to the NN and could remain localized
> without any interface change...
>
> Your proposal would help for sure. I see 3 points if we try to do it
> for specific functions like recovery.
>  - we would then need to manage the case when all 3 nodes timeouts
> after 1s, hoping that two of them are wrong positive...
>  - the writes between DN would still be with the old timeout. I didn't
> look in details at the impact. It won't be an issue for single box
> crash, but for large failure it could.
>  - we would want to change it to for the ipc.Client as well. Note sure
> if the change would not be visible to all functions.
>
> What worries me about setting very low timeouts is that it's difficult
> to validate, it tends to work until it goes to production...
>
> I was also thinking of making the deadNodes list public in the client,
> so hbase could tell to the DFSClient: 'this node is dead, I know it
> because I'm recovering the RS', but it would have some false positive
> (software region server crash), and seems a little like a
> workaround...
>
> In the middle (thinking again about your proposal), we could add a
> function in hbase that would first check the DNs owning the WAL,
> trying to connect with a 1s timeout, to be able to tell the DFSClient
> who's dead.
> Or we could put this function in DFSClient, a kind of boolean to say
> fail fast on dn errors for this read...
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Todd Lipcon <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hey Nicolas,
>>
>> Another idea that might be able to help this without adding an entire
>> new state to the protocol would be to just improve the HDFS client
>> side in a few ways:
>>
>> 1) change the "deadnodes" cache to be a per-DFSClient structure
>> instead of per-stream. So, after reading one block, we'd note that the
>> DN was dead, and de-prioritize it on future reads. Of course we'd need
>> to be able to re-try eventually since dead nodes do eventually
>> restart.
>> 2) when connecting to a DN, if the connection hasn't succeeded within
>> 1-2 seconds, start making a connection to another replica. If the
>> other replica succeeds first, then drop the connection to the first
>> (slow) node.
>>
>> Wouldn't this solve the problem less invasively?
>>
>> -Todd
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 2:20 PM, N Keywal <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have looked at the HBase MTTR scenario when we lose a full box with
>>> its datanode and its hbase region server altogether: It means a RS
>>> recovery, hence reading the logs files and writing new ones (splitting
>>> logs).
>>>
>>> By default, HDFS considers a DN as dead when there is no heartbeat for
>>> 10:30 minutes. Until this point, the NaneNode will consider it as
>>> perfectly valid and it will get involved in all read & write
>>> operations.
>>>
>>> And, as we lost a RegionServer, the recovery process will take place,
>>> so we will read the WAL & write new log files. And with the RS, we
>>> lost the replica of the WAL that was with the DN of the dead box. In
>>> other words, 33% of the DN we need are dead. So, to read the WAL, per
>>> block to read and per reader, we've got one chance out of 3 to go to
>>> the dead DN, and to get a connect or read timeout issue. With a
>>> reasonnable cluster and a distributed log split, we will have a sure
>>> winner.
>>>
>>>
>>> I looked in details at the hdfs configuration parameters and their
>>> impacts. We have the calculated values:
>>> heartbeat.interval = 3s ("dfs.heartbeat.interval").
>>> heartbeat.recheck.interval = 300s ("heartbeat.recheck.interval")
>>> heartbeatExpireInterval = 2 * 300 + 10 * 3 = 630s => 10.30 minutes
>>>
>>> At least on 1.0.3, there is no shutdown hook to tell the NN to
>>> consider this DN as dead, for example on a software crash.
>>>
>>> So before the 10:30 minutes, the DN is considered as fully available
>>> by the NN.  After this delay, HDFS is likely to start replicating the
>>> blocks contained in the dead node to get back to the right number of
>>> replica. As a consequence, if we're too aggressive we will have a side
>>> effect here, adding workload to an already damaged cluster. According
>>> to Stack: "even with this 10 minutes wait, the issue was met in real
>>> production case in the past, and the latency increased badly". May be
>>> there is some tuning to do here, but going under these 10 minutes does
>>> not seem to be an easy path.
>>>
>>> For the clients, they don't fully rely on the NN feedback, and they
>>> keep, per stream, a dead node list. So for a single file, a given
>>> client will do the error once, but if there are multiple files it will
>>> go back to the wrong DN. The settings are:
>>>
>>> connect/read:  (3s (hardcoded) * NumberOfReplica) + 60s 
>>> ("dfs.socket.timeout")
>>> write: (5s (hardcoded) * NumberOfReplica) + 480s
>>> ("dfs.datanode.socket.write.timeout")
>>>
>>> That will set a 69s timeout to get a "connect" error with the default 
>>> config.
>>>
>>> I also had a look at larger failure scenarios, when we're loosing a
>>> 20% of a cluster. The smaller the cluster is the easier it is to get
>>> there. With the distributed log split, we're actually on a better
>>> shape from an hdfs point of view: the master could have error writing
>>> the files, because it could bet a dead DN 3 times in a row. If the
>>> split is done by the RS, this issue disappears. We will however get a
>>> lot of errors between the nodes.
>>>
>>> Finally, I had a look at the lease stuff Lease: write access lock to a
>>> file, no other client can write to the file. But another client can
>>> read it. Soft lease limit: another client can preempt the lease.
>>> Configurable.
>>> Default: 1 minute.
>>> Hard lease limit: hdfs closes the file and free the resources on
>>> behalf of the initial writer. Default: 60 minutes.
>>>
>>> => This should not impact HBase, as it does not prevent the recovery
>>> process to read the WAL or to write new files. We just need writes to
>>> be immediately available to readers, and it's possible thanks to
>>> HDFS-200. So if a RS dies we should have no waits even if the lease
>>> was not freed. This seems to be confirmed by tests.
>>> => It's interesting to note that this setting is much more aggressive
>>> than the one to declare a DN dead (1 minute vs. 10 minutes). Or, in
>>> HBase, than the default ZK timeout (3 minutes).
>>> => This said, HDFS states this: "When reading a file open for writing,
>>> the length of the last block still being written is unknown
>>> to the NameNode. In this case, the client asks one of the replicas for
>>> the latest length before starting to read its content.". This leads to
>>> an extra call to get the file length on the recovery (likely with the
>>> ipc.Client), and we may once again go to the wrong dead DN. In this
>>> case we have an extra socket timeout to consider.
>>>
>>> On paper, it would be great to set "dfs.socket.timeout" to a minimal
>>> value during a log split, as we know we will get a dead DN 33% of the
>>> time. It may be more complicated in real life as the connections are
>>> shared per process. And we could still have the issue with the
>>> ipc.Client.
>>>
>>>
>>> As a conclusion, I think it could be interesting to have a third
>>> status for DN in HDFS: between live and dead as today, we could have
>>> "sick". We would have:
>>> 1) Dead, known as such => As today: Start to replicate the blocks to
>>> other nodes. You enter this state after 10 minutes. We could even wait
>>> more.
>>> 2) Likely to be dead: don't propose it for write blocks, put it with a
>>> lower priority for read blocks. We would enter this state in two
>>> conditions:
>>>   2.1) No heartbeat for 30 seconds (configurable of course). As there
>>> is an existing heartbeat of 3 seconds, we could even be more
>>> aggressive here.
>>>   2.2) We could have a shutdown hook in hdfs such as when a DN dies
>>> 'properly' it says to the NN, and the NN can put it in this 'half dead
>>> state'.
>>>   => In all cases, the node stays in the second state until the 10.30
>>> timeout is reached or until a heartbeat is received.
>>>  3) Live.
>>>
>>>  For HBase it would make life much simpler I think:
>>>  - no 69s timeout on mttr path
>>>  - less connection to dead nodes leading to ressources held all other
>>> the place finishing by a timeout...
>>>  - and there is already a very aggressive 3s heartbeat, so we would
>>> not add any workload.
>>>
>>>  Thougths?
>>>
>>>  Nicolas
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Todd Lipcon
>> Software Engineer, Cloudera

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