Re: send UPTODATE to follower until a quorum of servers synced with leader

[Flavio Junqueira]

Hi Jiangwen, Good catch. I followed the code and it does sound like this scenario can happen, ignoring how sessions are handled. I checked that a follower takes a snapshot and starts a zookeeper server right after receiving an UPTODATE message. I'm not clear, though, if it is possible for a client to revalidate a session while the leader hasn't started. I was discussing with Ben offline and it sounds like we do not necessarily wait for a leader to come up to revalidate sessions. I'm not so familiar with the session handling part of the code, so I'll let perhaps Ben or someone else add to this discussion.  In any case, you might want to open a jira to track our comments so that we don't miss important comments. I also wanted to point out that we have been observing a few corner cases like the one you raised, and we have been designing changes to the implementation that take care of such problems. If I'm not mistaken, the scenario you point out wouldn't happen under our changes because followers would wait for a commit message (wait for a quorum to ack) before starting a server, as you point out. The latest notes on the design are under Zab1.0 in the ZooKeeper wiki. Thanks, -Flavio On Mar 28, 2011, at 10:24 AM, jiangwen w wrote: 1. current process when leader fail, a new leader will be elected, followers will sync with the new leader. After synced, leader send UPTODATE to follower. 2. a corner case but there is a corner case, things will go wrong. suppose message M only exists on leader, after a follower synced with leader, the client connected to the follower will see M. but it only exists on two servers, not on a quorum of servers. If the new leader and the follower failed, message M is lost, but M is already seen by client. 3. one solution So I think UPTODATE  can be sent to follower only when a quorum of server synced with the leader. Sincerely flavio junqueira   research scientist   f...@yahoo-inc.com direct +34 93-183-8828   avinguda diagonal 177, 8th floor, barcelona, 08018, es phone (408) 349 3300    fax (408) 349 3301