Re: [Postgres-xc-general] Few queries from Varprasad

[Mason <ma...@us...>]

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4:22 AM, Ashutosh Bapat
<ash...@en...> wrote:
> Hi All,
> One of my colleague in Sybase, came across my article in Linux For You
> magazine and sent following queries. I thought it better to discuss on XC
> general forum.
>
> Varprasad was earlier working with Sybase and has long experience with HA,
> Shared disk cluster and RDBMS in general.
>
> 1) what are the HA aspects of various component failures? What is current HA
> recommendations for various failures (coo, datanode or gtm etc)?

There is a GTM standby component, but HA is something that will be
worked on in the future. For now you could add replication to the
nodes, but you'll have to roll your own failover.

> 2) why GTM is desinged as centralized server? Is it possible to make it work
> in distributed manner so as to remove the bottleneck and SPOF?

It is centralized so that transaction ids and snapshots can be
assigned centrally.

Yes, it can eventually become a bottleneck. At what point, I don't
think we can say definitively. One thing that somewhat mitigates the
issue is that snapshots are grouped together and shared for multiple
snapshot requests from the same GTM Proxy. Different from PostgreSQL
is that the snapshot will contain the requestors' XIDs.

In PG 9.2 some work was done to reduce locking when getting snapshots.
We may want to try and apply the same here and see if it helps.

Anyway, even with more work done here to improve this, we will end up
with really large snapshots as more nodes are added. As the number of
connections increases and the number of open transactions increase,
when checking tuple visibility it will potentially have to look at
many more XIDs, slowing down performance some on all nodes. What
probably also has an impact is the global xmin.  If it is low because
of a long running transaction on one or two nodes, it is going to slow
down everybody because of more visibility checking on all nodes. We
have not measured this though, so I cannot say what the exact impact
is. We have done some things to minimize the impact of a long running
vacuum on one of the nodes.

As far as SPOF goes, there is a GTM Standby to help. It requires a GTM
Proxy though, so we could do something to make sure GTM proxy on
restarts if it crashes (daemonize or watchdog).

> 3) what is the expacted scale-up for very large number of nodes 50-100, esp
> considering that the scale-up reduces with larger number of nodes.

More research is needed.

> 4) Is GTM used for repeatable reads as well, apart from the Write
> transactions?

Even when reading, one needs an XID and a snapshot obtained from GTM.

> 5) Do all coordinators need to be alive to get this setup working esp for
> DDLs. We observed that connection pooling component gives error when the DDL
> is fired after a coordinator crashes.

I think more work could be done to make this flexible. We intended to
make coordinators not as critical of a component as the others. That
is, try and reach the point where if you lose some coordinators but
others are up, that is ok, we should be able to continue processing.
Also, we want to make it easy to spin up a new coordinator. We aren't
quite there yet though.

Regards,

Mason


>
> --
> Best Wishes,
> Ashutosh Bapat
> EntepriseDB Corporation
> The Enterprise Postgres Company
>
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