[jbosscache-dev] buddy replication test failures in 1.4.x

[Galder Zamarreno]

Hi,

I have gone through some of the failures I'm getting when running the 
test suite for 1.4.x:

* Some buddy replication tests show this test failures:
junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: buddy's list of groups it 
participates in should contain data owner's group name at 
org.jboss.cache.buddyreplication.BuddyReplicationTestsBase.assertIsBuddy(BuddyReplicationTestsBase.java:280) 


Earlier in the test, you can see this Exception:
org.jboss.cache.buddyreplication.BuddyNotInitException: Not yet initialised
	at 
org.jboss.cache.buddyreplication.BuddyManager.handleAssignToBuddyGroup(BuddyManager.java:450)
	at org.jboss.cache.TreeCache._remoteAssignToBuddyGroup(TreeCache.java:5372)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at 
sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at 
sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:585)
	at org.jgroups.blocks.MethodCall.invoke(MethodCall.java:330)

This failure seems to be a related to a timing issue, when a node 
requests another to join the buddy group but this node is still in the 
initialisation process, BM.init(). More precisely, the code is 
broadcasting buddy pool membership, and at that point a, request to 
joing the buddy groups occurs.

The channel is connected before the buddy manager is initialised, so 
there's always the possibility of receiving messages before buddy 
manager has finished initialising.

Various solutions that come to my mind:
1.- staggering cache starts
2.- wait for a little bit before throwing BuddyNotInitException seeing 
that the broadcasting task could be lengthy (i.e. one of the nodes fails 
to respond as the call is synchronous), maybe wait for 
buddyCommunicationTimeout?

IMO, 2 is preferred.

-- 
Galder Zamarreño
Sr. Software Maintenance Engineer
JBoss, a division of Red Hat