Hi James,

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 3:46 PM, james lesorg
<[email protected]>wrote:

> I really enjoyed this talk. Would make a great article.
>
> I wonder whether i understand the motivation behind "sequence" numbers
> correctly: we cannot just timestamp worker entities and then churn
> through them chronologically because instance times can be wildly out
> of sync? If that's the case, how can i trust the eta parameter when
> creating task objects?
>

Timestamps will generally not be 'wildly' out of sync due to NTP, but even a
few hundred milliseconds is enough to cause concurrency/synchronization
issues. In order to maintain a consistent view of data, we need a true
global clock, and using a wall-clock is not a practical solution in a
distributed system.

As far as ETAs go, the ETA only specifies the earliest time a task should
run - the task queue may run your task after the ETA.


>
> Is the possibility of a worker / task race condition really greater
> than the risk of the memcache lock disappearing? Is it at all possible
> that the memcache lock will disappear in this scenario, and if so how
> can we survive this edge case?
>

The memcache locks on the fan-in control batching, so the worst case if the
locks vanish should be poor fan-in - it shouldn't affect data consistency.

-Nick Johnson


>
> Sorry if this is a duplicate post - It seems the question i asked
> earlier got lost in google groups weirdness.
>
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-- 
Nick Johnson, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine Google Ireland Ltd. ::
Registered in Dublin, Ireland, Registration Number: 368047
Google Ireland Ltd. :: Registered in Dublin, Ireland, Registration Number:
368047

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