[infinispan-dev] CacheLoaders, Distribution mode and Interceptors

Tue Mar 19 07:51:39 EDT 2013

On 16 Mar 2013, at 01:19, Sanne Grinovero wrote:

> Hi Adrian,
> let's forget about Lucene details and focus on DIST.
> With numOwners=1 and having two nodes the entries should be stored
> roughly 50% on each node, I see nothing wrong with that
> considering you don't need data failover in a read-only use case
> having all the index available in the shared CacheLoader.
> 
> In such a scenario, and having both nodes preloaded all data, in case
> of a get() operation I would expect
> either:
> A) to be the owner, hence retrieve the value from local in-JVM reference
> B) to not be the owner, so to forward the request to the other node
> having roughly 50% chance per key to be in case A or B.
> 
> But when hitting case B) it seems that instead of loading from the
> other node, it hits the CacheLoader to fetch the value.
> 
> I already had asked James to verify with 4 nodes and numOwners=2, the
> result is the same so I suggested him to ask here;
> BTW I think numOwners=1 is perfectly valid and should work as with
> numOwners=1, the only reason I asked him to repeat
> the test is that we don't have much tests on the numOwners=1 case and
> I was assuming there might be some (wrong) assumptions
> affecting this.
> 
> Note that this is not "just" a critical performance problem but I'm
> also suspecting it could provide inconsistent reads, in two classes of
> problems:
> 
> # non-shared CacheStore with stale entries
> If for non-owned keys it will hit the local CacheStore first, where
> you might expect to not find anything, so to forward the request to
> the right node. What if this node has been the owner in the past? It
> might have an old entry locally stored, which would be returned
> instead of the correct value which is owned on a different node.
> 
> # shared CacheStore using write-behind
> When using an async CacheStore by definition the content of the
> CacheStore is not trustworthy if you don't check on the owner first
> for entries in memory.
> 
> Both seem critical to me, but the performance impact is really bad too.
> 
> I hoped to make some more tests myself but couldn't look at this yet,
> any help from the core team would be appreciated.
I think you have a fair point and reads/writes to the data should be coordinated through its owners both for performance and (more importantly) correctness.
Mind creating a JIRA for this?

> 
> @Ray, thanks for mentioning the ClusterCacheLoader. Wasn't there
> someone else with a CacheLoader issue recently who had worked around
> the problem by using a ClusterCacheLoader ?
> Do you remember what the scenario was?
> 
> Cheers,
> Sanne
> 
> On 15 March 2013 15:44, Adrian Nistor <anistor at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hi James,
>> 
>> I'm not an expert on InfinispanDirectory but I've noticed in [1] that
>> the lucene-index cache is distributed with numOwners = 1. That means
>> each cache entry is owned by just one cluster node and there's nowhere
>> else to go in the cluster if the key is not available in local memory,
>> thus it needs fetching from the cache store. This can be solved with
>> numOwners > 1.
>> Please let me know if this solves your problem.
>> 
>> Cheers!
>> 
>> On 03/15/2013 05:03 PM, James Aley wrote:
>>> Hey all,
>>> 
>>> <OT>
>>> Seeing as this is my first post, I wanted to just quickly thank you
>>> all for Infinispan. So far I'm really enjoying working with it - great
>>> product!
>>> </OT>
>>> 
>>> I'm using the InfinispanDirectory for a Lucene project at the moment.
>>> We use Lucene directly to build a search product, which has high read
>>> requirements and likely very large indexes. I'm hoping to make use of
>>> a distribution mode cache to keep the whole index in memory across a
>>> cluster of machines (the index will be too big for one server).
>>> 
>>> The problem I'm having is that after loading a filesystem-based Lucene
>>> directory into InfinispanDirectory via LuceneCacheLoader, no nodes are
>>> retrieving data from the cluster - they instead look up keys in their
>>> local CacheLoaders, which involves lots of disk I/O and is very slow.
>>> I was hoping to just use the CacheLoader to initialize the caches, but
>>> from there on read only from RAM (and network, of course). Is this
>>> supported? Maybe I've misunderstood the purpose of the CacheLoader?
>>> 
>>> To explain my observations in a little more detail:
>>> * I start a cluster of two servers, using [1] as the cache config.
>>> Both have a local copy of the Lucene index that will be loaded into
>>> the InfinispanDirectory via the loader. This is a test configuration,
>>> where I've set numOwners=1 so that I only need two servers for
>>> distribution to happen.
>>> * Upon startup, things look good. I see the memory usage of the JVM
>>> reflect a pretty near 50/50 split of the data across both servers.
>>> Logging indicates both servers are in the cluster view, all seems
>>> fine.
>>> * When I send a search query to either one of the nodes, I notice the following:
>>>   - iotop shows huge (~100MB/s) disk I/O on that node alone from the
>>> JVM process.
>>>   - no change in network activity between nodes (~300b/s, same as when idle)
>>>   - memory usage on the node running the query increases dramatically,
>>> and stays higher even after the query is finished.
>>> 
>>> So it seemed to me like each node was favouring use of the CacheLoader
>>> to retrieve keys that are not in memory, instead of using the cluster.
>>> Does that seem reasonable? Is this the expected behaviour?
>>> 
>>> I started to investigate this by turning on trace logging, in this
>>> made me think perhaps the cause was that the CacheLoader's interceptor
>>> is higher priority in the chain than the the distribution interceptor?
>>> I'm not at all familiar with the design in any level of detail - just
>>> what I picked up in the last 24 hours from browsing the code, so I
>>> could easily be way off. I've attached the log snippets I thought
>>> relevant in [2].
>>> 
>>> Any advice offered much appreciated.
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> James.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> [1] https://www.refheap.com/paste/12531
>>> [2] https://www.refheap.com/paste/12543
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> infinispan-dev mailing list
>>> infinispan-dev at lists.jboss.org
>>> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/infinispan-dev
>> 
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Cheers,
-- 
Mircea Markus
Infinispan lead (www.infinispan.org)