[CASSANDRA-12796] Heap exhaustion when rebuilding secondary index over a table with wide partitions

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Urgent
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.2.9, 3.0.11, 3.10
• Component/s: Feature/2i Index, Legacy/Core
• Severity: Critical
• Since Version: 2.2.7
• Assignee: Sam Tunnicliffe
• Reporter: Milan Majercik

Authors

Sam Tunnicliffe

Reviewers

Jeremiah Jordan

• Created: 17/Oct/16 09:10
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:30
• Resolved: 13/Dec/16 10:41

Description

We have a table with rather wide partition and a secondary index defined over it. As soon as we try to rebuild the index we observed exhaustion of Java heap and eventual OOM error. After a lengthy investigation we have managed to find a culprit which appears to be a wrong granule of barrier issuances in method org.apache.cassandra.db.Keyspace.indexRow:

        try (OpOrder.Group opGroup = cfs.keyspace.writeOrder.start()){html}
        {
            Set<SecondaryIndex> indexes = cfs.indexManager.getIndexesByNames(idxNames);

            Iterator<ColumnFamily> pager = QueryPagers.pageRowLocally(cfs, key.getKey(), DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE);
            while (pager.hasNext())
            {
                ColumnFamily cf = pager.next();
                ColumnFamily cf2 = cf.cloneMeShallow();
                for (Cell cell : cf)
                {
                    if (cfs.indexManager.indexes(cell.name(), indexes))
                        cf2.addColumn(cell);
                }
                cfs.indexManager.indexRow(key.getKey(), cf2, opGroup);
            }
        }

Please note the operation group granule is a partition of the source table which poses a problem for wide partition tables as flush runnable (org.apache.cassandra.db.ColumnFamilyStore.Flush.run()) won't proceed with flushing secondary index memtable before completing operations prior recent issue of the barrier. In our situation the flush runnable waits until whole wide partition gets indexed into the secondary index memtable before flushing it. This causes an exhaustion of the heap and eventual OOM error.

After we changed granule of barrier issue in method org.apache.cassandra.db.Keyspace.indexRow to query page as opposed to table partition secondary index (see https://github.com/mmajercik/cassandra/commit/7e10e5aa97f1de483c2a5faf867315ecbf65f3d6?diff=unified), rebuild started to work without heap exhaustion.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #83