Option to notify client when desired replication factor not achieved for an update request.

I've been thinking about how SolrCloud deals with write-availability using in-sync replica sets, in which writes will continue to be accepted so long as there is at least one healthy node per shard.

For a little background (and to verify my understanding of the process is correct), SolrCloud only considers active/healthy replicas when acknowledging a write. Specifically, when a shard leader accepts an update request, it forwards the request to all active/healthy replicas and only considers the write successful if all active/healthy replicas ack the write. Any down / gone replicas are not considered and will sync up with the leader when they come back online using peer sync or snapshot replication. For instance, if a shard has 3 nodes, A, B, C with A being the current leader, then writes to the shard will continue to succeed even if B & C are down.

The issue is that if a shard leader continues to accept updates even if it loses all of its replicas, then we have acknowledged updates on only 1 node. If that node, call it A, then fails and one of the previous replicas, call it B, comes back online before A does, then any writes that A accepted while the other replicas were offline are at risk to being lost.

SolrCloud does provide a safe-guard mechanism for this problem with the leaderVoteWait setting, which puts any replicas that come back online before node A into a temporary wait state. If A comes back online within the wait period, then all is well as it will become the leader again and no writes will be lost. As a side note, sys admins definitely need to be made more aware of this situation as when I first encountered it in my cluster, I had no idea what it meant.

My question is whether we want to consider an approach where SolrCloud will not accept writes unless there is a majority of replicas available to accept the write? For my example, under this approach, we wouldn't accept writes if both B&C failed, but would if only C did, leaving A & B online. Admittedly, this lowers the write-availability of the system, so may be something that should be tunable?

From Mark M: Yeah, this is kind of like one of many little features that we have just not gotten to yet. I’ve always planned for a param that let’s you say how many replicas an update must be verified on before responding success. Seems to make sense to fail that type of request early if you notice there are not enough replicas up to satisfy the param to begin with.