On the face of it, your scenario seems plausible. I can offer two pieces of info that may or may not help you:
1. A write request to Solr will not be acknowledged until an attempt has been made to write to all relevant replicas. So, B won’t ever be missing updates that were applied to A, unless communication with B was disrupted somehow at the time of the update request. You can add a min_rf param to your write request, in which case the response will tell you how many replicas received the update, but it’s still up to your indexer client to decide what to do if that’s less than your replication factor. See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Read+and+Write+Side+Fault+ Tolerance for more info. 2. There are two forms of replication. The usual thing is for the leader for each shard to write an update to all replicas before acknowledging the write itself, as above. If a replica is less than N docs behind the leader, the leader can replay those docs to the replica from its transaction log. If a replica is more than N docs behind though, it falls back to the replication handler recovery mode you mention, and attempts to re-sync the whole shard from the leader. The default N for this is 100, which is pretty low for a high-update-rate index. It can be changed by increasing the size of the transaction log, (via numRecordsToKeep) but be aware that a large transaction log size can delay node restart. See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/UpdateHandlers+in+SolrConf ig#UpdateHandlersinSolrConfig-TransactionLog for more info. Hope some of that helps, I don’t know a way to say delete-first-on-recovery. On 10/27/15, 5:21 PM, "Brian Scholl" <bsch...@legendary.com> wrote: >Whoops, in the description of my setup that should say 2 replicas per >shard. Every server has a replica. > > >> On Oct 27, 2015, at 20:16, Brian Scholl <bsch...@legendary.com> wrote: >> >> Hello, >> >> I am experiencing a failure mode where a replica is unable to recover >>and it will try to do so forever. In writing this email I want to make >>sure that I haven't missed anything obvious or missed a configurable >>option that could help. If something about this looks funny, I would >>really like to hear from you. >> >> Relevant details: >> - solr 5.3.1 >> - java 1.8 >> - ubuntu linux 14.04 lts >> - the cluster is composed of 1 SolrCloud collection with 100 shards >>backed by a 3 node zookeeper ensemble >> - there are 200 solr servers in the cluster, 1 replica per shard >> - a shard replica is larger than 50% of the available disk >> - ~40M docs added per day, total indexing time is 8-10 hours spread >>over the day >> - autoCommit is set to 15s >> - softCommit is not defined >> >> I think I have traced the failure to the following set of events but >>would appreciate feedback: >> >> 1. new documents are being indexed >> 2. the leader of a shard, server A, fails for any reason (java crashes, >>times out with zookeeper, etc) >> 3. zookeeper promotes the other replica of the shard, server B, to the >>leader position and indexing resumes >> 4. server A comes back online (typically 10s of seconds later) and >>reports to zookeeper >> 5. zookeeper tells server A that it is no longer the leader and to sync >>with server B >> 6. server A checks with server B but finds that server B's index >>version is different from its own >> 7. server A begins replicating a new copy of the index from server B >>using the (legacy?) replication handler >> 8. the original index on server A was not deleted so it runs out of >>disk space mid-replication >> 9. server A throws an error, deletes the partially replicated index, >>and then tries to replicate again >> >> At this point I think steps 6 => 9 will loop forever >> >> If the actual errors from solr.log are useful let me know, not doing >>that now for brevity since this email is already pretty long. In a >>nutshell and in order, on server A I can find the error that took it >>down, the post-recovery instruction from ZK to unregister itself as a >>leader, the corrupt index error message, and then the (start - whoops, >>out of disk- stop) loop of the replication messages. >> >> I first want to ask if what I described is possible or did I get lost >>somewhere along the way reading the docs? Is there any reason to think >>that solr should not do this? >> >> If my version of events is feasible I have a few other questions: >> >> 1. What happens to the docs that were indexed on server A but never >>replicated to server B before the failure? Assuming that the replica on >>server A were to complete the recovery process would those docs appear >>in the index or are they gone for good? >> >> 2. I am guessing that the corrupt replica on server A is not deleted >>because it is still viable, if server B had a catastrophic failure you >>could pick up the pieces from server A. If so is this a configurable >>option somewhere? I'd rather take my chances on server B going down >>before replication finishes than be stuck in this state and have to >>manually intervene. Besides, I have disaster recovery backups for >>exactly this situation. >> >> 3. Is there anything I can do to prevent this type of failure? It >>seems to me that if server B gets even 1 new document as a leader the >>shard will enter this state. My only thought right now is to try to >>stop sending documents for indexing the instant a leader goes down but >>on the surface this solution sounds tough to implement perfectly (and it >>would have to be perfect). >> >> If you got this far thanks for sticking with me. >> >> Cheers, >> Brian >> >
