Dear Stephen, Its very interesting:) I hope the following tips will give more idea about the client session management....
>>>>>1) How does the Follower get notified of that session expiration so that it can remove the client from its SessionTracker? As you know, Leader.SessionTrackerImpl will do the expiration ticks and once it reaches the expiry time will create 'closeSession' request and add to the RequestProcessor chain. Simulateneously this request will go to the Follower and will be same as normal 'request' processing lifecycle. >>>>2) Similarly, how does the Follower know to terminate its ServerCnxn with the client? Once the 'closesession' request is ready for committing Leader will pass the command to the Follower and corresponding FinalRequestProcessor in the Follower will do the session closure. >>>>3) Can a client's session persist indefinitely if leader election keeps flip-flopping (its unlikely to happen I know, but I'm just curious)? Only Leader is having the logic to evaluate session expiry and raise 'closesession' request. He will do the countdown after successfully becoming as Leader. In ZK, there is nothing like elapsed time for a client session and after every Leader re-election, will begin the countdown freshly. Yeah, unstability in the zk leadership would delay the client session expiry as no record of elapsed time in the system. Example: Say client session timeout is 30secs, assume timeout has elapsed 20secs, now there is a fluctuation and again new Leader has re-elcted. Here once more the countdown starts from 30secs and the client will be getting additional grace period to rejoin. -Rakesh ________________________________________ From: Stephen Skeirik [skeir...@illinois.edu] Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2012 12:40 AM To: user@zookeeper.apache.org Subject: ZooKeeper Client Session Management Dear All, I am working on a model of the ZooKeeper software for academic purposes. Since it is only a model, I don't want to replicate every detail of the system. However, I also want to write the model in such a way that it can be extended to show lower-level detail without a major rewrite (that is, I want to have the details in mind, even if I don't make use of them now). In particular, right now I am working on modelling client session management, and I was hoping someone could fill in the gaps in my understanding. The standalone case seems straightforward: the ZooKeeperServer creates a SessionTrackerImpl which invokes the ZooKeeperServer's expire method to end sessions when the session has timed out. However, I can't seem to put all the pieces together for the distributed case. From my reading, if a client is connected directly to the leader, his session management is handled as in the standalone case. However, if the client is connected to a Follower, it is different. The Followers report all of their session data to the leader, who actually manages session expiration. Since the Leader has a SessionTrackerImpl, eventually, the Leader's expire() method will be called to initiate ending the session. But the two things I can't seem to figure out are: 1) How does the Follower get notified of that session expiration so that it can remove the client from its SessionTracker? 2) Similarly, how does the Follower know to terminate its ServerCnxn with the client? And a related question, which I just thought to ask: 3) Can a client's session persist indefinitely if leader election keeps flip-flopping (its unlikely to happen I know, but I'm just curious)? Any insight would be awesome! Thanks, Stephen Skeirik
