You don't demote yourself on disconnect. (Everyone else may still believe you are the leader.) Check out the "Things to Remember about Watches" section in the programmer's guide.
When you are disconnected from ZK you don't know what is happening, so you have to act conservatively. Your session may or may not have expired. You will not know for sure until you reconnect to ZK. ben ________________________________________ From: thomas.john...@sun.com [thomas.john...@sun.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 8:24 AM To: zookeeper-user@hadoop.apache.org Subject: Re: Simpler ZooKeeper event interface.... Hiram Chirino wrote: > Knowing about a disconnection may be important to some apps. For > example if an app uses ZK for leader election, and the leader gets > disconnected from ZK, he should give up being the leader, since a > different leader may get elected while he is disconnected from ZK. > > Is that necessarily true? My assumption is the following - if I'm connected to multiple ZK servers, then assuming the leader election recipe given in the docs, the leader needs to only demote itself if its session expires. Of course, doing the same on disconnect does not violate safety, it just seems too pessimistic. In the case of followers, a disconnected event would mean that they will have to wait for reconnection before being able to determine if one of them should in fact be the leader.
