I created a link off of the main wiki and the page itself:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/ZooKeeper/FailureScenarios

Would someone please review it?  Specifically, I am curious to know about this:
"if the leader is in the non-quorum side of the partition, that side of the 
partition will recognize that it no longer has a quorum of the ensemble. The 
leader will be demoted to being a regular ZooKeeper server and those nodes will 
no longer accept reads or writes."
I just wanted to clarify - in the time for the non-quorum side to recognize it 
is no longer a quorum, will there ever be writes that get through?  Is it 
guaranteed that it won't accept writes after the partition?  I don't think that 
guarantee can exist, but wondered how to handle that.

On Dec 9, 2010, at 2:04 PM, Mahadev Konar wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
>   Responses in line below:
> 
> On 12/9/10 11:53 AM, "Jeremy Hanna" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I looked around on the wiki and in the user list archives and couldn't find 
> something definitive about certain failure scenarios.
> 
> A partition splits the ensemble where a quorum is on one side of the partition
> -- if the leader is on the quorum side of the partition, what happens to 
> reads/writes that go to the non-quorum side?  I assume writes return errors 
> because it can't get to the leader.  Reads?
> 
>> The reads will also fail on all the quorum nodes until a new quorum is 
>> elected.
> 
> -- if the leader is on the non-quorum side of the partition, I would assume 
> that the quorum side of the partition would elect a new leader for those 
> clients on its side of the partition.  However, is there the possibility for 
> the leader on the non-quorum side to accept writes before it realizes that 
> there's no longer a quorum?  Just wondering about the possibility of 
> corruption and then when the cluster syncs back up how the cluster would 
> handle that data.
> 
>> No there isnt. The leader relinquishes its right as a leader as soon as it 
>> realizes a quorum isnt committing the changes it proposed.
> 
> (I would be happy to create a wiki page for failure scenarios if one doesn't 
> exist that people could add to, but maybe this is just common knowledge.)
> 
>> Please do!
> 
> thanks
> mahadev

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