[Bucardo-general] Conflict strategy 'bucardo_latest' and high latency

Hans van der Riet hans at electude.nl
Sat Mar 1 00:19:54 UTC 2014


Hi,

I have been performance testing 4.99.11 over high latency connections 
between several servers. The sync contains over 70 tables. On the nodes 
a simple test script continously modifies random rows in randomly 
selected tables. The performance is surprisingly good, until a conflict 
arises. The default 'bucardo_latest' conflict strategy is slow and takes 
a few minutes to pick a winner. Typically this results in more conflicts 
in subsequent sync runs, until Bucardo can't serialize due to concurrent 
updates on one of the nodes. All sync runs from then on fail 
(serialization errors) until the test scripts are turned off.

Digging in to this I found that the conflict strategy works quite 
differently from what I expected: it does not pick a winner for each 
conflicting row, but it picks a winning database for all conflicts based 
on the latest update. This can produce some quite unexpected results. 
For example when you run:

psql -h node1 -c "update t set node='node1' where id=1" test
psql -h node2 -c "update t set node='node2' where id=1" test
psql -h node3 -c "update t set node='node3' where id=2" test

and these updates are processed in one sync run, the result looks like 
this, once the conflict has been resolved:

  id |   node
----+-----------
   1 | old value
   2 | node3

Since node3 made the last update, it is the winner for all conflicting 
rows. Row id 1 is conflicting (node1 and node2), so the old value from 
node3 is restored. In the (theoretical) scenario of the performance test 
above this produces really undesired results, since syncing will fail 
for a long time with lots of conflicts.

The reason it takes so long to pick a winner is that Bucardo queries all 
delta tables individually on all nodes. When latency is high this will 
take a while.

Remarks / questions:

1. Maybe some side effects of bucardo_latest can be avoided, e.g. ignore 
databases that are not part of the conflict. Documentation / man page 
suggests something else.
2. Performance of the current bucardo_latest strategy can be improved 
dramatically when each node is only queried once, using a UNION across 
all delta tables to find MAX(txntime).
3. Are the bucardo_source, bucardo_target, bucardo_skip and 
bucardo_random strategies still working in 4.99?

Kind regards,
-- 
Hans van der Riet


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