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Posted to common-commits@hadoop.apache.org by Apache Wiki <wi...@apache.org> on 2009/05/07 19:53:58 UTC

[Hadoop Wiki] Update of "ZooKeeper/ErrorHandling" by BenjaminReed

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The following page has been changed by BenjaminReed:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/ZooKeeper/ErrorHandling

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   * Normal state exceptions: trying to create a znode that already exists, calling setData on an existing znode, doing a conditional write to a znode that has an unexpected version number, etc.
  
-  * Recoverable errors: the disconnected event and the connection loss exception are examples of recoverable errors, they indicate a problem that happened, but the ZooKeeper handle is still valid and future operations will probably succeed.
+  * Recoverable errors: the disconnected event, connection timed out, and the connection loss exception are examples of recoverable errors, they indicate a problem that happened, but the ZooKeeper handle is still valid and future operations will succeed once the ZooKeeper library can reestablish its connection to ZooKeeper.
  
   * Fatal errors: the ZooKeeper handle has become invalid. This can be due to an explicit close, authentication errors, or session expiration.
  
@@ -16, +16 @@

  
  == Recoverable errors ==
  
- Recoverable errors are passed back to the application because ZooKeeper itself cannot recover from them. "But wait", you say, "if I'm doing a getData(), can't ZooKeeper just reissue it for me". Yes, of course ZooKeeper could as long as you were just doing a getData(). What if you were doing a create() or a delete() or a conditional setData()? When a ZooKeeper client loses a connection to the ZooKeeper server there may be some requests in flight; we don't know where they were in their flight at the time of the connection loss.
+ Recoverable errors are passed back to the application because ZooKeeper itself cannot recover from them. The ZooKeeper library does try to recover the connection, so the handle should not be closed on a recoverable error, but the application must deal with the transient error. "But wait", you say, "if I'm doing a getData(), can't ZooKeeper just reissue it for me". Yes, of course ZooKeeper could as long as you were just doing a getData(). What if you were doing a create() or a delete() or a conditional setData()? When a ZooKeeper client loses a connection to the ZooKeeper server there may be some requests in flight; we don't know where they were in their flight at the time of the connection loss.
  
  For example the create we sent just before the loss may not have made it out of the network stack, or it may have made it to the ZooKeeper server we were connected to and been forwarded on to other servers before our server died. So, when we reestablish the connection to the ZooKeeper service we have no good way to know if our create executed or not. (The server actually has the needed information, but there is a lot of implementation work that needs to happen to take advantage of that information. Ironically, once we make the mutating requests re-issuable, the read requests become problematic...) So, if we reissue a create() request and we get a NodeExistsException, the ZooKeeper client doesn't know if the exception resulted because the previous request went through or someone else did the create.