[jira] [Resolved] (CASSANDRA-5396) Repair process is a joke leading to a downward spiralling and eventually unusable cluster

["Jonathan Ellis (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5396?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Jonathan Ellis resolved CASSANDRA-5396.
---------------------------------------

       Resolution: Invalid
    Fix Version/s:     (was: 2.1)

I suggest you try again with some actionable problem analysis ("here is what causes repair to become stuck; here is how we should fix that") and without the "everyone but me is an idiot" attitude.
                
> Repair process is a joke leading to a downward spiralling and eventually unusable cluster
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: CASSANDRA-5396
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-5396
>             Project: Cassandra
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Core
>    Affects Versions: 1.2.3
>         Environment: all
>            Reporter: David Berkman
>            Priority: Critical
>
> Let's review the repair process...
> 1) It's mandatory to run repair.
> 2) Repair has a high impact and can take hours.
> 3) Repair provides no estimation of completion time and no progress indicator.
> 4) Repair is extremely fragile, and can fail to complete, or become stuck quite easily in real operating environments.
> 5) When repair fails it provides no feedback whatsoever of the problem or possible resolution.
> 6) A failed repair operation saddles the effected nodes with a huge amount of extra data (judging from node size).
> 7) There is no way to rid the node of the extra data associated with a failed repair short of completely rebuilding the node.
> 8) The extra data from a failed repair makes any subsequent repair take longer and increases the likelihood that it will simply become stuck or fail, leading to yet more node corruption.
> 9) Eventually no repair operation will complete successfully, and node operations will eventually become impacted leading to a failing cluster.
> Who would design such a system for a service meant to operate as a fault tolerant clustered data store operating on a lot of commodity hardware?
> Solution...
> 1) Repair must be robust.
> 2) Repair must *never* become 'stuck'.
> 3) Failure to complete must result in reasonable feedback.
> 4) Failure to complete must not result in a node whose state is worse than before the operation began.
> 5) Repair must provide some means of determining completion percentage.
> 6) It would be nice if repair could estimate its run time, even if it could do so only based upon previous runs.

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