Details
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Improvement
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Status: Resolved
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Major
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Resolution: Auto Closed
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5.15.6
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None
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None
Description
In a event of an unclean shutdown, Activemq loses the information about the free pages in the index. In order to recover this information, ActiveMQ read the whole index during shutdown searching for free pages and then save the db.free file. This operation can take a long time, making the failover slower. (during the shutdown, activemq will still hold the lock).
From http://activemq.apache.org/shared-file-system-master-slave.html
"If you have a SAN or shared file system it can be used to provide high availability such that if a broker is killed, another broker can take over immediately."
Is important to note if the shutdown takes more than ACTIVEMQ_KILL_MAXSECONDS seconds, any following shutdown will be unclean. This broker will stay in this state unless the index is deleted (this state means that every failover will take more then ACTIVEMQ_KILL_MAXSECONDS, so, if you increase this time to 5 minutes, you fail over can take more than 5 minutes).
In order to prevent ActiveMQ reading the whole index file to search for free pages, we can keep track of those on every Checkpoint. In order to do that we need to be sure that db.data and db.free are in sync. To achieve that we can have a attribute in the db.free page that is referenced by the db.data.
So during the checkpoint we have:
1 - Save db.free and give a freePageUniqueId
2 - Save this freePageUniqueId in the db.data (metadata)
In a crash, we can see if the db.data has the same freePageUniqueId as the db.free. If this is the case we can safely use the free page information contained in the db.free
Now, the only way to read the whole index file again is IF the crash happens btw step 1 and 2 (what is very unlikely).
The drawback of this implementation is that we will have to save db.free during the checkpoint, what can possibly increase the checkpoint time.
Is also important to note that we CAN (and should) have stale data in db.free as it is referencing stale db.data:
Imagine the timeline:
T0 -> P1, P2 and P3 are free.
T1 -> Checkpoint
T2 -> P1 got occupied.
T3 -> Crash
In the current scenario after the Pagefile#load the P1 will be free and then the replay will mark P1 as occupied or will occupied another page (now that the recovery of free pages is done on shutdown)
This change only make sure that db.data and db.free are in sync and showing the reality in T1 (checkpoint), If they are in sync we can trust the db.free.
This is a really fast draft of what i'm suggesting... If you guys agree, i can create the proper patch after:
https://github.com/alanprot/activemq/commit/18036ef7214ef0eaa25c8650f40644dd8b4632a5
This is related to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AMQ-6590
