On Apr 10, 2013, at 2:26 PM, Tom Zeng <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> We have a production installation with only 3 nodes and running on 1.2.1.  
> I'd appreciate to get some  facts to convince IT to increase the number of 
> nodes to 7 and upgrade to 1.3.  I heard people from Basho mentioned ideally 7 
> nodes for production a couple of time, can someone explain why 7, is 4, or 5 
> nodes good enough?

I'm not sure where you heard the number 7 as a minimum, unless if was for a 
specific use-case. In general the minimum recommended number is 5 nodes.

Running with only 3 nodes isn't a great idea. Since a core purpose of Riak is 
to remain available in the face of outages, 3 will not support any outage. Less 
than 3 is lower than the default replication value (N=3). This is so important, 
in fact, that we recommend 5 solely to act as a buffer in the case where 1 of 
the 5 is down, the remaining 4 is dangerously close to the inflexible 3 node 
number. Even if you do not upgrade to 1.3, you really need to have at least 5 
nodes.

There are many benefits to upgrading to 1.3, but one of the most compelling 
from an operations point of view is active anti-entropy (AAE). Rather than 
waiting on read-repair to fix inconsistent values (which is passive), AAE 
routinely attempts to keep all node values in sync. This can be a godsend if a 
node goes down, since you don't need to fore read-repair when you bring the 
node back up by reading every key... you just let your cluster actively 
self-heal.


> Also on the 3 three nodes, the file size for the bitcask directory very quite 
> a bit: 21GB, 14GB, and 20GB. Could the node with only 14GB missing something 
> or it's expected to have such big difference?

There are several reasons sizes could be different. Values are not yet/ever 
replicated (based on your N and W values). Files may have not been compacted. 
Some keys have been deleted but not yet reaped...

> Thanks,
> Tom
> 
> -- 
> Tom Zeng
> Director of Engineering
> Intridea, Inc. | www.intridea.com
> [email protected]
> (o) 888.968.4332 x519
> (c) 240-643-8728
> _______________________________________________
> riak-users mailing list
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