[infinispan-dev] Proposal: ISPN-1394 Manual rehashing in 5.2

I think this is an important feature to have soon; My understanding of it: We default with the feature off, and newly discovered nodes are added/removed as usual. With a JMX operatable switch, one can disable this: If a remote node is joining the JGroups view, but rehash is off: it will be added to a to-be-installed view, but this won't be installed until rehash is enabled again. This gives time to add more changes before starting the rehash, and would help a lot to start larger clusters. If the [self] node is booting and joining a cluster with manual rehash off, the start process and any getCache() invocation should block and wait for it to be enabled. This would need of course to override the usually low timeouts. When a node is suspected it's a bit a different story as we need to make sure no data is lost. The principle is the same, but maybe we should have two flags: one which is a "soft request" to avoid rehashes of less than N members (and refuse N>=numOwners ?), one which is just disable it and don't care: data might be in a cachestore, data might not be important. Which reminds me, we should consider as well a JMX command to flush the container to the CacheLoader. --Sanne