Ben Pfaff <b...@ovn.org> wrote on 08/19/2016 10:11:59 AM: > From: Ben Pfaff <b...@ovn.org> > To: Ryan Moats/Omaha/IBM@IBMUS > Cc: Numan Siddique <nusid...@redhat.com>, ovs dev <dev@openvswitch.org> > Date: 08/19/2016 10:12 AM > Subject: incremental updates (was: Re: [ovs-dev] [PATCH 2/2] ovn/ > TODO: Add items proposed for 2.7 in OVN IRC meeting.) > > On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 08:34:45AM -0500, Ryan Moats wrote: > > We've been running incremental processing in ovn-controller here for quite > > a while (even before it merged officially) and given our experience, > > I've been doing some hard thinking about it. > > > > The original goal of the patch set was to allow ovn-controller to use > > incremental updates as much as possible. However, the range of possible > > changes in inputs resulted in ovn-controller having to continue to > > maintain the ability to run a full update in those cases where previously > > calculated rules are no longer correct. > > > > What we've found is that most configuration events from our CMS (Neutron) > > end up triggering a full ovn-controller update, and so the end result of > > the incremental processing code is not that ovn-controller is doing > > incremental updates most of the time, but rather that ovn-controller > > doesn't recalculate changes in-between modifications. > > > > While we still feel that the above is a win, I'm coming to the conclusion > > that the current code base has added unnecessary complexity to achieve > > this. Based on this, I'm thinking of the following approach: > > > > 1) going back to doing full processing every cycle, while still > > keeping the persistence of items where we can, because I feel that > > persistence has allowed us to handle cases where we need to skip a poll > > cycle that we didn't have before and that has improved things. > > What I'm hearing here is that we'll do full processing if any processing > at all is necessary. Seems fine to me. > > > 2) introducing a new command flag to allow those that don't want to > > run in what I'm now calling quiet mode to continue to do full processing > > every cycle. (In retrospect, I should have proposed this up front for i-p > > to allow for better isolation of that code, but as they say, hindsight > > is always 20/20). > > Hmm. I would hope that "Full processing if any processing" is fairly > easy to get right. However, I'm OK with having a flag as a fail-safe. > In time, I would hope that we could delete the flag. > > > 3) For quiet mode, check the integration bridge and Ben's sequence > > number information in the SB database to determine if anything has > > changed since the last cycle. If something has changed, run the full > > processing code. If not, quiesce for a poll cycle. > > I don't think that the sequence numbers are a good way to determine > whether something has changed. Without --wait, for example, ovn-nbctl > doesn't change the sequence number.
Yes on #1 - that's the intent. Apologies for not being more clear that in re my thinking for suggesting the command line flag. I agree that we'd deprecate it long term if we added it, but .... (and now I move to #3) I know that sequence numbers are only there today if asked for, and I was thinking of arguing that they should always be there and that ovn-nbctl should *check* them only if --wait is set. However, there might be other ways to figure out if the SB DBs have changed (I'll admit, I've not thought of any yet - anybody have any ideas?) _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openvswitch.org http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/dev