[Gluster-devel] Improving real world performance by moving files closer to their target workloads

[Derek Price]

I mostly agree with you.  A few additional points are inlined below.

gordan at bobich.net wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2008, Derek Price wrote:
> 
>> gordan at bobich.net wrote:
>>> Isn't that effectively the same thing? Unless there is quorum, DLM 
>>> locks out the entire FS (it also does this when a node dies, until it 
>>> gets definitive confirmation that it has been successfully fenced). 
>>> For normal file I/O all nodes in the cluster have to acknowledge a 
>>> lock before it can be granted.
>>
>> Why?  It requires a meta-data cache, but as long as every node in the 
>> quorum stores a given file's most recent revision # when any lock is 
>> granted, even if it doesn't actually sync the file data, then any 
>> quorum should be able to agree on what the version number of the most 
>> up-to-date copy of a file is. All nodes are required to report only if 
>> you assume that any given file has a small number of "owners" and that 
>> the querier doesn't know who the owner is.
> 
> That's to do with file versioning, not locking, though. What am I missing?

I'm assuming that versioning and locking can and should be combined. 
You've admitted the necessity for keeping copies of files synchronized 
and IO is always going to require some sort of lock to accomplish this. 
  By having the quorum remain aware of what the most recent version of a 
given file is, whether that file is locked, and perhaps where copies of 
the file reside, you could reduce the number of nodes that must be 
consulted when a lock is needed.

I think you will also speed things up if you don't have to consult all 
nodes for every IO operation.  If all available nodes must be consulted, 
then you introduce an implicit wait until a specified timeout for every 
IO request if any single node is down.  With the quorum model, even 
before fencing takes place, almost half the nodes can go incommunicado 
and the rest can operate as efficiently as they did with all nodes in 
service.

If some HA and fault-tolerant DHT implementation exists that already 
handles atomic hash inserts with recognizable failures for keys that 
already exist, then perhaps that could take the place of DLM's quorum 
model, but I think any algorithm that requires contacting all nodes will 
prove to be a bad idea in the end.

>> To remain fault tolerant, this requires that servers make some effort 
>> to stay up-to-date with the meta-data cache, but maybe this could be 
>> dealt with efficiently with the DHT someone else brought up?
> 
> I'm not sure that so much metadata caching is actually necessary. If a 
> file open brings the file to the local machine (this cannot be 
> guaranteed because the local machine may be out of space, and it may be 
> unable to free space by expunging an old file due to that file not being 
> redundant enough in the network), then the metadata of that file, being 
> attached to the file, is implicitly "cached". But this isn't really 
> caching at all - it's migration.
> 
> The algorithm for opening a file might be as follows:
> 1) node broadcasts/multicasts an open request to all peers
> 2) peers that have the file available respond with the metadata (size, 
> version, etc) they have and possibly their current load (to assist with 
> load balancing by fetching the file from the least loaded peer)
> 3.1) if the file is available locally, agree a lock with other nodes, 
> and use it.
> 3.2) if the file is not available locally, but there is enough space, 
> fetch it and do 3.1)
> 3.3) if there isn't enough space locally to fetch the file, see if 
> enough space can be freed. If this succeeds, do 3.2)
> 3.4) if space cannot be freed, use the file remotely from the least 
> loaded peer.
> 
> Expunging algorithm would be similar - broadcast a file status request 
> (similar to 1) above). If enough nodes respond with the latest version 
> of the file (set some threshold depending on how much redundancy is 
> required), the local file can be be removed and the space freed for a 
> file that is more useful locally. This shouldn't really happen until the 
> local data store starts to get full.

I might optimize the expunge algorithm slightly by having nodes with low 
loads volunteer to copy files that otherwise couldn't be expunged from a 
node.  Better yet, perhaps, would be a background process that runs on 
lightly loaded nodes and tries to create additional redundant copies at 
some configurable tolerance beyond the "minimum # of copies" threshold. 
  If copies beyond the minimum are only created on file access, then a 
heavily loaded node could quickly fill up its own disk with all the 
"redundant" copies of files and have to start relying on remote access, 
further bogging down the busy node.

> Locking could be handled somewhat lazily - a lock request gets broadcast 
> and as long as quorum peers respond, and there are no peers saying "no, 
> I have that lock!", the lock can be granted. A lock can have TTL (in 
> case a node dies while holding a lock), and the refresh should be 
> expected if the node expects to keep the lock. This could be used to 
> speed up locking (each node would have a list of currently valid locks, 
> without the need to check explicitly, for example - it would only need 
> to broadcast a lock-request when it looks like the lock can be granted).
> 
> For file delta writes, an AFR type mechanism could be used to send the 
> deltas to all the nodes that have the file. This could all get quite 
> tricky, because it might require a separate multicast group to be set up 
> for up to every node combination subset, in order to keep the network 
> bandwidth down (or you'd just end up broadcasting to all nodes, which 
> means things wouldn't scale as switches should, it'd be more like using 
> hubs).
> 
> This would potentially have the problem that there is only 24 bits of IP 
> multicast address space, but that should provide enough groups with 
> sensible redundancy levels to cover all node combinations. This may or 
> may not be way OTT complicated, though. There is probably a simpler and 
> more sane solution.

I'm not sure what overhead is involved in creating multicast groups, but 
they would only be required for files currently locked for write, so 
perhaps creating and discarding the multicast groups could be done in 
conjunction with creation and release of write locks.

It's also possible that you could reduce the complexity of this problem 
by simply discarding as many copies down to as close to the minimum # as 
other nodes will allow, on write.  However, I think that might reduce 
some of the performance benefits this design otherwise gives each node. 
  Perhaps there are some useful ideas on how to perform this complex 
synchronization already in the design of P2P file transfer networks? 
What would that be, something like implicit striping based on the 
locations of valid redundant copies/deltas?

Derek
-- 
Derek R. Price
Solutions Architect
Ximbiot, LLC <http://ximbiot.com>
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