FWIW - we've been using HAProxy in front of a cassandra cluster in production and haven't run into any problems yet. It sounds like our cluster is tiny in comparison to Anthony M's cluster. But I just wanted to mentioned that others out there are doing the same.
One thing in this thread that I thought was interesting is Ben's initial comment "the presence of the proxy precludes clients properly backing off from nodes returning errors." I think it would be very cool if someone implemented a mechanism for haproxy to detect the error nodes and then enable it to drop those nodes from the rotation. I'd be happy to help with this, as I know how it works with haproxy and standard web servers or other tcp servers. But, I'm not sure how to make it work with Cassandra, since, as Ben points out, it can return valid tcp responses (that say "error-condition") on the standard port. Dave Viner On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Anthony Molinaro < antho...@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 12:20:10PM -0700, Benjamin Black wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Anthony Molinaro > > <antho...@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote: > > > > > > > > > I don't know it seems to tax our setup of 39 extra large ec2 nodes, its > > > also closer to 24000 reqs/sec at peak since there are different tables > > > (2 tables for each read and 2 for each write) > > > > > > > Could you clarify what you mean here? On the face of it, this > > performance seems really poor given the number and size of nodes. > > As you say I would expect to achieve much better performance given the node > size, but if you go back and look through some of the issues we've seen > over time, you'll find we've been hit with nodes being too small, having > too few nodes to deal with request volume, having OOMs, having bad > sstables, > having the ring appear different to different nodes, and several other > problems. > > Many of i/o problems presented themselves as MessageDeserializer pool > backups > (although we stopped having these since Jonathan was by and suggested row > cache of about 1Gb, thanks Riptano!). We currently have mystery OOMs > which are probably caused by GC storms during compactions (although usually > the nodes restart and compact fine, so who knows). I also regularly watch > nodes go away for 30 seconds or so (logs show node goes dead, then comes > back to life a few seconds later). > > I've sort of given up worrying about these, as we are in the process of > moving this cluster to our own machines in a colo, so I figure I should > wait until they are moved, and see how the new machines do before I worry > more about performance. > > -Anthony > > -- > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Anthony Molinaro <antho...@alumni.caltech.edu> >
