David Berkman created CASSANDRA-5396: ----------------------------------------
Summary: Repair process is a joke leading to a downward spiralling and eventually unusable cluster Key: CASSANDRA-5396 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5396 Project: Cassandra Issue Type: Bug Components: Core Affects Versions: 1.2.3 Environment: all Reporter: David Berkman Priority: Critical Fix For: 2.1 Let's review the repair process... 1) It's mandatory to run repair. 2) Repair has a high impact and can take hours. 3) Repair provides no estimation of completion time and no progress indicator. 4) Repair is extremely fragile, and can fail to complete, or become stuck quite easily in real operating environments. 5) When repair fails it provides no feedback whatsoever of the problem or possible resolution. 6) A failed repair operation saddles the effected nodes with a huge amount of extra data (judging from node size). 7) There is no way to rid the node of the extra data associated with a failed repair short of completely rebuilding the node. 8) The extra data from a failed repair makes any subsequent repair take longer and increases the likelihood that it will simply become stuck or fail, leading to yet more node corruption. 9) Eventually no repair operation will complete successfully, and node operations will eventually become impacted leading to a failing cluster. Who would design such a system for a service meant to operate as a fault tolerant clustered data store operating on a lot of commodity hardware? Solution... 1) Repair must be robust. 2) Repair must *never* become 'stuck'. 3) Failure to complete must result in reasonable feedback. 4) Failure to complete must not result in a node whose state is worse than before the operation began. 5) Repair must provide some means of determining completion percentage. 6) It would be nice if repair could estimate its run time, even if it could do so only based upon previous runs. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira