SolrCloud vs Solr master-slave replication - solr

I've had this week an issue with a Solr index: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/corrupted-index-in-slave-td4054769.html,
Today, that error started to happen constantly for almost every request, and I created a JIRA issue becaue I thought it was a bug https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-4707
As you can read, at the end it was due to a fail in the Solr master-slave replication, and now I don't know if we should think about migrating to SolrCloud, since Solr master-slave replications seems not to fit to our requirements:
index size: ~20 million documents, ~9GB
~1200 updates/min
~10000 queries/min (distributed over 2 slaves) MoreLikeThis, RealTimeGet, TermVectorComponent, SearchHandler
I would thank you if anyone could help me to answer these questions:
Would it be advisable to migrate to SolrCloud? Would it have impact on the replication performance?
In that case, what would have better performance? to maintain a copy of the index in every server, or to use shard servers?
How many shards and replicas would you advice for ensuring high availability?
Kind Regards,
Victor

Well, answer to all your questions depends on what exactly you want from solrcloud.
Yes,it would be advisable to move over to solrcloud as it provides High availability,scalability and Near real time search plus automated hot replication.But these features comes at the cost of slightly performance degradation (You want notice even in well configured cluster).
I would suggest you should use shared configuration to allow solr to maintain index data for you (I am sure you will bring smile to TechOps people if you do so). This will reduce human errors and resource requirement as well.
Answer to your last question entirely depends on your cloud deployment.You should try with 2 shard 2 replica configuration and then create test deployment to ensure that it serves your needs.If not, try with different combinations of shard and replica counts until u get what u want(I know its pain !).
At last don't forget to estimate your future growth(How much data you will add to your cluster in next couple of years), and keeping in mind you should decide shards and replicas

Related

SolrCloud - 2 nodes cluster

We are planning to implement SolrCloud in our solution (mainly for data replication reasons and disaster recovery), unfortunately some of our customers have only 2DCs - and one DC may be completely destroyed.
We are aware that running ZK in 2 locations is problematic, as ZK requires quorum. And downtime on any side with 2 ZK nodes would cause cluster failure. And cluster failure would be also triggered by network partition between locations (master will cease to be master due to quorum lost, slave can't elect himself for the same reason).
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So our current plan A is to go with a single ZK for both sites and backup ZK into the other site. So if the site withou ZK dies, we are OK. If the site with ZK dies, we should be able to start new ZK from backup and reconfigure Solr.
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We also considered plan B with classic master-slave replication between the sites. BUT we are using Time Routed Aliases, hence we need SolrCloud features, hence we would need also to replicate data/configuratin in ZooKeeper (not only Solr index). So this case seems only as more manual work in Solr, while we would still need to backup/restore ZK. So this plan was rejected.
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Plan C may be to have 2ZK, but one with with bigger weight. This should survive partition and dead of ZK with lower weight. The first ZK node should be automatically backed up using standard cluster mechanics. But I do not even know about anyone using ZK this way...
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Is there any smarter way, how to setup SolrCloud in 2 nodes environment? Which solution should we prefer?
We do not expect High Availability; we want to achieve disaster recovery. Administrator intervention is expected in case of node failure, we only need to be resilient to short network glitches.
Edit: CDCR (Cross Data Center Replication) with Time Routed Aliases
We are considering to use TRA, because our data are time based, and customers are usually interested only in latest slice/partition. Without TRA, the index grows and performance degrades, more (unused/old) stuff is in index & RAM...
Here comes a problem with CDCR, according to docs, the source&target collection parameters are required. But with TRA, collections are created with the same solrconfig.xml automatically (every X days/months). This problem in CDCR is known (see comments), but not resolved yet.
Also it seems that CDCR really does not synchronize ZooKeeper (I have not found any mentions of the functionality in docs, jira and in code), which may be ok with static number of collections, but is very problematic with dynamically created collections (especially by some machinery in background outside users/developers code).
Edit: According to David (the main author of TRA), CDCR&TRA combination is not to be supported.

Combining Solr 3x-style Master/Slave "Repeater" to feed remote 4x SolrCloud instances?

Solr 3x "Repeaters" and Multiple Data Centers:
Solr 3x let a node behave as both a slave and master, pull from one master, and then feed copies downstream to its own slaves. This was so common/useful it even had a name, a "Repeater".
This was useful if you wanted span multiple data centers. You could have the real master in data center A (DCA), and a "repeater" in data center B (DCB). That repeater would then grab content from DCA and feed all of the other nodes in DCB, saving on bandwidth.
Suppose you want to upgrade this setup to Solr 4x and SolrCloud. (Note that Solr 4x still supports Solr 3x-style legacy replication)
It's said that you should NOT have a single SolrCloud cluster span disparate data centers. So data center B should have it's own SolrCloud.
One idea is to have the DCA -> DCB link still use Solr 3x-style Master/Slave replication. And then the "repeater" in DCB, being also a SolrCloud node, would automatically be propagated to other nodes.
Main question:
Can a Solr node participate in both Solr 3x-style master/slave mode (as a slave) and also be part of a SolrCloud cluster? And if so, how is this configured?
Complications:
In the simple case, if it's just 1 shard with replicas, it's easy to see how that might work in terms of data. It's a little less clear if you have multiple shards in DCB, how do I tell each shard to only replicate its own share of data? Note that SolrCloud normally replicates via transactions, whereas 3x uses binary indices.
Another complexity is if you're doing replication. How do you tell just the master node for each shard to pull from the remote DCA node?
Alternatives:
On solution is to upgrade to 4x but continue using 3x-style replication in DCB, so just don't use SolrCloud.
I realize that another solution would be to have the data feed send it's updates to both data centers, or usE something like RabbitMQ. For the sake of this question, let's assume thats not an option (long story...)
Maybe there's some other way I haven't thought of?
Has anybody actually tried having SolrCloud span data centers? How horrible is it?
Somebody must have asked this question before!
But I've looked on Google and, although it finds tons of pages with the keywords, I haven't seen this specific "hybrid" mode fleshed out. I found one thread from 2013 but it didn't really talk about the configuration and complexity.
To answer your first question, a Solr slave in 3.X style cannot be a node in a Solr Cloud. The reason is the slave in a master/slave 3.X Solr config simply replicates, byte for byte, all the index files on the master. That's all it does. It can, in the repeater config, then also be a master for others to replicate from, or be a dedicated query slave or both. But that's it.
A node in a Solr Cloud config is a full participant in a distributed computing cluster where indexing is generally intended to be distributed across all nodes, and all nodes participate in queries. It's a very powerful feature which automatically handles failed nodes and significantly eases the work load of scaling up that was very manual in 3.X style.
However, part of what you pay for that is increased complexity (Zookeeper), requirements for lower latency inter-node communications (because all the nodes now talk to each other and to Zookeeper) and the loss of the simplicity of Master/Slave replication.
At 20M docs you are well within the constraints of a single node master index with an effectively unlimited number of slaves and therefor very high query capacity. I do this today with a production environment where each master has on the order of 60M docs in it with no significant problems.
The question is do you need NRT, multi-node indexing, automated failover, the ability to autoscale well past 100M docs? If so then Master/Slave it probably not going to work for you.
You could take a look at writing the same data to two different Solr Cloud clusters, one in each datacenter. You could do that directly, or use something like Apache Flume to do it for you - in either there are some issues with doing this and so the real question is are dealing with those issues worth it to get the added benefit of Solr Cloud?

Solr master-master replication alternatives?

Currently we have 2 servers with a load-balancer before them. We want to be able to turn 1 machine off and later on, without the user noticing it.
Our application also uses solr and now i wanted to install & configure solr on both servers and the question is how do i configure a master-master replication?
After my initial research i found out that it's not possible :(
But what are my options here? I want both indices to stay in sync and when a document is commited on one server it should also go to the other.
Thanks for your help!
Not certain of your specific use case (why turn 1 server on and off?), there is no specific "master-master" replication. Solr does however support distributed indexing and querying via SolrCloud. From the documentation for SolrCloud:
Replication ensures redundancy for your data, and enables you to send
an update request to any node in the shard. If that node is a
replica, it will forward the request to the leader, which then
forwards it to all existing replicas, using versioning to make sure
every replica has the most up-to-date version. This architecture
enables you to be certain that your data can be recovered in the event
of a disaster, even if you are using Near Real Time searching.
It's a bit complex so I'd suggest you spend some time going thru the documentation as it's not quite as simple as setting up a couple of masters and load balancing between them. It is a big step up from the previous master/slave replication that Solr used, so even if it's not a perfect fit it will be a lot closer to what you need.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/SolrCloud
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Getting+Started+with+SolrCloud
You can just create a simple master - slave replication as described here:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Index+Replication
But be sure you send your inserts, deletes, updates directly to the master, but selects can go through the load balancer.
The other alternative is to create a third server as a master, and 2 slaves, and the lode balancer can be in front of the two slaves.

Keeping index optimized / merged in SolrCloud

With master-slave implementation of distributed Solr (prior to Solr 4.x) it was a straight design solution to have master which takes load for indexing, merging and optimizing index. Then the index gets copied to replicas while replicas meanwhile are always serving searches.
Could someone explain how this is done now with SolrCloud?
Seems like SolrCloud sends indexing commands to each replica from leader. But how the search performance could be achieved then? Indexing and searching on each replica makes load on each node server (to index and run merge thread in background) and since my index is quite big it takes a lot of time usually to merge segments or simply optimize.
Should I deliver that all now to merge policy and not worry at all? Does TieredMergePolicy provide both good search performance and low resource load (CPU, I/O) at the same time?
I'll try to answer part of your questions: SolrCloud indeed indexes on all nodes, and therefore it has a performance impact on replicas. This is done due to 'hot replication' model instead of 'cold replication' as you are used to. It comes to solve data integrity issues as well as real time search on a cluster. You get consistent data and faster data availability as a price of performance impact. Actually, you can always split data to shards (at a price of additional hardware), and have comparable performance.
In either case, it's up to you to decide whether SolrCloud suits your needs. You can use Solr 4 without cloud model and manage it yourself as before.

Improving database record retrieval throughput with appengine

Using AppEngine with Python and the HRD retrieving records sequentially (via an indexed field which is an incrementing integer timestamp) we get 15,000 records returned in 30-45 seconds. (Batching and limiting is used.) I did experiment with doing queries on two instances in parallel but still achieved the same overall throughput.
Is there a way to improve this overall number without changing any code? I'm hoping we can just pay some more and get better database throughput. (You can pay more for bigger frontends but that didn't affect database throughput.)
We will be changing our code to store multiple underlying data items in one database record, but hopefully there is a short term workaround.
Edit: These are log records being downloaded to another system. We will fix it in the future and know how to do so, but I'd rather work on more important things first.
Try splitting the records on different entity groups. That might force them to go to different physical servers. Read entity groups in parallel from multiple threads or instances.
Using cache mght not work well for large tables.
Maybe you can cache your records, like use Memcache:
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/
This could definitely speed up your application access. I don't think that App Engine Datastore is designed for speed but for scalability. Memcache however is.
BTW, if you are conscious about the performance that GAE gives as per what you pay, then maybe you can try setting up your own App Engine cloud with:
AppScale
JBoss CapeDwarf
Both have an active community support. I'm using CapeDwarf in my local environment it is still in BETA but it works.
Move to any of the in-memory databases. If you have Oracle Database, using TimesTen will improve the throughput multifold.

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