Take a look at this section to start:
http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/docs/current/zookeeperAdmin.html#sc_commonProblems
What type of monitoring are you doing on your cluster? You could monitor
at both the host and at the java (jmx) level. That will give you some
insight on where to look; cpu, memory, disk, network, etc... Also the
ZooKeeper JMX will give you information about latencies and such (you
can even use the four letter words for that if you want to hack up
some scripts instead of using jmx). JMX will also give you insight into
the JVM workings - so for example you could confirm/ruleout the scenario
outlined by Nitay (gc causing the jvm java threads to hang for 30sec
at a time, including the ZK heartbeat).
I've seen similar to what you describe a few times now, in each case it
was something different. In one case for example there was a cluster of
5k clients attaching to a ZK cluster, ~20% of the clients had
mis-configured nics, that was causing high tcp packet loss (and
therefore high network latency), which caused a similar situation to
what you are seeing, but only under fairly high network load (which made
it hard to track down!).
I've also seen situations where ppl run the entire zk cluster on a set
of VMWare vms, all on the same host system. Latency on this
configuration was 10sec in some cases due to resource issues (in
particular io - see the link I provided above, dedicated log devices are
critical to low latency operation of the ZK cluster).
In your scenario I think 5 sec timeout is too low, probably much too
low. Why? You are running in virtualized environments on non-dedicated
hardware outside your control/inspection. There is typically no way to
tell (unless you are running on the 8 core ec2 systems) if the ec2 host
you are running on is over/under subscribed (other vms). There is no way
to control disk latency either. You could be seeing large latencies due
to resource contention on the ec2 host alone. In addition to that I've
heard that network latencies in ec2 are high relative to what you would
see if you were running on your own dedicated environment. It's hard to
tell the latency btw the servers and client-server w/in the ec2
environment you are seeing w/out measuring it.
Keep in mind the the timeout period is used by both the client and the
server. If the ZK leader doesn't hear from the client w/in the timeout
(say it's 5 sec) it will expire the session. The client is sending a
ping after 1/3 of the timeout period. It expects to hear a response
before another 1/3 of the timeout elapses, after which it will attempt
to re-sync to another server in the cluster. In the 5 sec timeout case
you are allowing 1.3 seconds for the request to go to the server, the
server to respond back to the client, and the client to process the
response. Check the latencies in ZK's JMX as I suggested to the hbase
team in order to get insight into this (i.e. if the server latency is
high, say because of io issues, or jvm swapping, vm latency, etc... that
will cause the client/sessions to timeout)
Hope this helps.
Patrick
Mahadev Konar wrote:
Hi Ted,
These problems seem to manifest around getting lots of anomalous disconnects
and session expirations even though we have the timeout values set to 2
seconds on the server side and 5 seconds on the client side.
Your scenario might be a little differetn from what Nitay (Hbase) is
seeing. In their scenario the zookeeper client was not able to send out
pings to the server due to gc stalling threads in their zookeeper
application process.
The latencies in zookeeper clients are directly related to Zookeeper server
machines. It is very much dependant on the disk io latencies that you would
get on the zookeeper servers and network latencies with your cluster.
I am not sure how much sensitive you want your zookeeper application to be
-- but increasing the timeout should help. Also, we recommend using
dedicated disk for zookeeper log transactions.
http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/docs/r3.1.1/zookeeperAdmin.html#sc_streng
thsAndLimitations
Also, we have seen Ntp having problems and clocks going back on one of our
vm setup. This would lead to session getting timed out earler than the set
session timeout.
I hope this helps.
mahadev
On 4/14/09 5:48 PM, Ted Dunning ted.dunn...@gmail.com wrote:
We have been using EC2 as a substrate for our search cluster with zookeeper
as our coordination layer and have been seeing some strange problems.
These problems seem to manifest around getting lots of anomalous disconnects
and session expirations even though we have the timeout values set to 2
seconds on the server side and 5 seconds on the client side.
Has anybody else been seeing this?
Is this related to clock jumps in a virtualized setting?
On a related note, what is best practice for handling session expiration?
Just deal with it as if it is a new start?
