read repair/reconciliation breaks slice based iteration at QUORUM
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                 Key: CASSANDRA-2643
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-2643
             Project: Cassandra
          Issue Type: Bug
    Affects Versions: 0.7.5
            Reporter: Peter Schuller
            Priority: Critical


In short, I believe iterating over columns is impossible to do reliably with 
QUORUM due to the way reconciliation works.

The problem is that the SliceQueryFilter is executing locally when reading on a 
node, but no attempts seem to be made to consider limits when doing 
reconciliation and/or read-repair (RowRepairResolver.resolveSuperset() and 
ColumnFamily.resolve()).

If a node slices and comes up with 100 columns, and another node slices and 
comes up with 100 columns, some of which are unique to each side, 
reconciliation results in > 100 columns in the result set. In this case the 
effect is limited to "client gets more than asked for", but the columns still 
accurately represent the range. This is easily triggered by my test-case.

In addition to the client receiving "too many" columns, I believe some of them 
will not be satisfying the QUORUM consistency level for the same reasons as 
with deletions (see discussion below).

Now, there *should* be a problem for tombstones as well, but it's more subtle. 
Suppose A has:

  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  6

and B has:

  1
  del 2
  del 3
  del 4
  5
  6 

If you now slice 1-6 with count=3 the tombstones from B will reconcile with 
those from A - fine. So you end up getting 1,5,6 back. This made it a bit 
difficult to trigger in a test case until I realized what was going on. At 
first I was "hoping" to see a "short" iteration result, which would mean that 
the process of iterating until you get a short result will cause spurious "end 
of columns" and thus make it impossible to iterate correctly.

So; due to 5-6 existing (and if they didn't, you legitimately reached 
end-of-columns) we do indeed get a result of size 3 which contains 1,5 and 6. 
However, only node B would have contributed columns 5 and 6; so there is 
actually no QUORUM consistency on the co-ordinating node with respect to these 
columns. If node A and C also had 5 and 6, they would not have been considered.

Am I wrong?

In any case; using script I'm about to attach, you can trigger the 
over-delivery case very easily:

(0) disable hinted hand-off to avoid that interacting with the test
(1) start three nodes
(2) create ks 'test' with rf=3 and cf 'slicetest'
(3) ./slicetest.py hostname_of_node_C insert # let it run for a few seconds, 
then ctrl-c
(4) stop node A
(5) ./slicetest.py hostname_of_node_C insert # let it run for a few seconds, 
then ctrl-c
(6) start node A, wait for B and C to consider it up
(7) ./slicetest.py hostname_of_node_A slice # make A co-ordinator though it 
doesn't necessarily matter

You can also pass 'delete' (random deletion of 50% of contents) or 
'deleterange' (delete all in [0.2,0.8]) to slicetest, but you don't trigger a 
short read by doing that (see discussion above).


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