I've been fighting fires the last day where certain of our solr nodes will have a long GC pauses that cause them to lose their ZK connection and have to reconnect. That would be annoying, but survivable, although obvious it's something I want to fix.
But what makes it fatal is the current design of the state update queue. Every time one of our nodes flaps, it ends up shoving thousands of state updates and leader requests onto the queue, most of them ultimately futile. By the time the state is actually published, it's already stale. At one point we had 400,000 items in the queue and I just had to declare bankruptcy, delete the entire queue, and elect a new overseer. Later, we had 70,000 items from several flaps that took an hour to churn through. even after I'd shut down the problematic nodes. Again, almost entirely useless, repetitive work. Digging through ZKController and related code, the current model just seems terribly outdated and non-scalable now. If a node flaps for just a moment, do we really need to laboriously update every core's state down, just to mark it up again? What purpose does this serve that isn't already served by the global live_nodes presence indication and/or leader election nodes? Rebooting a node creates a similar set of problems, a couple hundred cores end up generating thousands of ZK operations to just to back to normal state. We're at enough of breaking point that I *have* to do something here for our own cluster. I would love to put my head together with some of the more knowledgeable Solr operations folks to help redesign something that could land in master and improve scalability for everyone. I'd also love to hear about any prior art or experiments folks have done. And if there are already efforts in process to address this very issue, apologies for being out of the loop. Thanks! Scott
