Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2019 17:21:50 -0700
From: Rich Megginson <rmeggins(a)redhat.com>
Message-ID: <d40bde83-1e88-b34f-9b5d-d2b320468f14(a)redhat.com>
On 2/26/19 4:26 PM, William Brown wrote:
>> I think the recursive/nested transaction on the database level are not the
problem, we do this correctly already, either all or no change becomes persistent.
>> What we do not manage is modifications we do in parallel on the in memory
structure like the entry cache, changes to the EC are not managed by any txn and I do not
see how any of the database txn models would help, they do not know about ec and can abort
changes.
>> We would need to incorporate the EC into a generic txn model, or have a way to
flag ec entries as garbage for if a txn is aborted
> The issue is we allow parallel writes, which breaks the consistency guarantees of the
EC anyway. LMDB won’t allow parallel writes (it’s single write - concurrent parallel
readers), and most other modern kv stores take this approach too, so we should be
remodelling our transactions to match this IMO. It will make the process of how we reason
about the EC much much simpler I think.
Some sort of in-memory data structure with fast lookup and
transactional semantics (modify operations are stored as mvcc/cow so each read of the
database with a given txn handle sees its own
view of the ec, a txn commit updates the parent txn ec view, or the global ec view if no
parent, from the copy, a txn abort deletes the txn's copy of the ec) is needed. A
quick google search
turns up several hits. I'm not sure if the B+Tree proposed at
http://www.port389.org/docs/389ds/design/cache_redesign.html has transactional semantics,
or if such code could be added to its
implementation.
With LMDB, if we could make the on-disk entry representation the same as the in-memory
entry representation, then we could use LMDB as the entry cache too - the database would
be the entry
cache as well.
Exactly. This was the original design goal for back-mdb and LMDB in OpenLDAP.
http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/200905/msg00036.html
Note that the back-mdb in OpenLDAP 2.4 is a compromise from this original design; we
still
have a slight deserialization pass when reading entries from the DB. But it's much
simpler
and faster than what we used to do with back-bdb/hdb.
Ultimately - if your local persistence layer is so slow that it needs an in-memory cache,
that local persistence layer is broken. This conclusion is inescapable, after many years
of
working with BerkeleyDB.
--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp.
http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun
http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP
http://www.openldap.org/project/