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Hello,<br>
<br>
I using Fuel 6.0.1 and find that RabbitMQ recover time is long after
power failure. I have a running HA environment, then I reset power
of all the machines at the same time. I observe that after reboot it
usually takes 10 minutes for RabittMQ cluster to appear running
master-slave mode in pacemaker. If I power off all the 3 controllers
and only start 2 of them, the downtime sometimes can be as long as
20 minutes.<br>
<br>
I have a little investigation and find out there are some possible
causes.<br>
<br>
1. MySQL Recovery Takes Too Long [1] and Blocking RabbitMQ
Clustering in Pacemaker<br>
<br>
The pacemaker resource p_mysql start timeout is set to 475s.
Sometimes MySQL-wss fails to start after power failure, and
pacemaker would wait 475s before retry starting it. The problem is
that pacemaker divides resource state transitions into batches.
Since RabbitMQ is master-slave resource, I assume that starting all
the slaves and promoting master are put into two different batches.
If unfortunately starting all RabbitMQ slaves are put in the same
batch as MySQL starting, even if RabbitMQ slaves and all other
resources are ready, pacemaker will not continue but just wait for
MySQL timeout.<br>
<br>
I can re-produce this by hard powering off all the controllers and
start them again. It's more likely to trigger MySQL failure in this
way. Then I observe that if there is one cloned mysql instance not
starting, the whole pacemaker cluster gets stuck and does not emit
any log. On the host of the failed instance, I can see a mysql
resource agent process calling the sleep command. If I kill that
process, the pacemaker comes back alive and RabbitMQ master gets
promoted. In fact this long timeout is blocking every resource from
state transition in pacemaker.<br>
<br>
This maybe a known problem of pacemaker and there are some
discussions in Linux-HA mailing list [2]. It might not be fixed in
the near future. It seems in generally it's bad to have long timeout
in state transition actions (start/stop/promote/demote). There maybe
another way to implement MySQL-wss resource agent to use a short
start timeout and monitor the wss cluster state using monitor
action.<br>
<br>
I also find a fix to improve MySQL start timeout [3]. It shortens
the timeout to 300s. At the time I sending this email, I can not
find it in stable/6.0 branch. Maybe the maintainer needs to
cherry-pick it to stable/6.0 ?<br>
<br>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/fuel/+bug/1441885">https://bugs.launchpad.net/fuel/+bug/1441885</a><br>
[2]
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.linux-ha.org/pipermail/linux-ha/2014-March/047989.html">http://lists.linux-ha.org/pipermail/linux-ha/2014-March/047989.html</a><br>
[3] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://review.openstack.org/#/c/171333/">https://review.openstack.org/#/c/171333/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
2. RabbitMQ Resource Agent Breaks Existing Cluster<br>
<br>
Read the code of the RabbitMQ resource agent, I find it does the
following to start RabbitMQ master-slave cluster.<br>
On all the controllers:<br>
(1) Start Erlang beam process<br>
(2) Start RabbitMQ App (If failed, reset mnesia DB and cluster
state)<br>
(3) Stop RabbitMQ App but do not stop the beam process<br>
<br>
Then in pacemaker, all the RabbitMQ instances are in slave state.
After pacemaker determines the master, it does the following.<br>
On the to-be-master host:<br>
(4) Start RabbitMQ App (If failed, reset mnesia DB and cluster
state)<br>
On the slaves hosts:<br>
(5) Start RabbitMQ App (If failed, reset mnesia DB and cluster
state)<br>
(6) Join RabbitMQ cluster of the master host<br>
<br>
As far as I can understand, this process is to make sure the master
determined by pacemaker is the same as the master determined in
RabbitMQ cluster. If there is no existing cluster, it's fine. If it
is run after power failure and recovery, it introduces the a new
problem.<br>
<br>
After power recovery, if some of the RabbitMQ instances reach step
(2) roughly at the same time (within 30s which is hard coded in
RabbitMQ) as the original RabbitMQ master instance, they form the
original cluster again and then shutdown. The other instances would
have to wait for 30s before it reports failure waiting for tables,
and be
reset to a standalone cluster.<br>
<br>
In RabbitMQ documentation [4], it is also mentioned that if we
shutdown RabbitMQ master, a new master is elected from the rest of
slaves. If we continue to shutdown nodes in step (3), we reach a
point that the last node is the RabbitMQ master, and pacemaker is
not aware of it. I can see there is code to bookkeeping a
"rabbit-start-time" attribute in pacemaker to record the most long
lived instance to help pacemaker determine the master, but it does
not cover the case mentioned above. A recent patch [5] checks
existing "rabbit-master" attribute but it neither cover the above
case.<br>
<br>
So in step (4), pacemaker determines a different master which was a
RabbitMQ slave last time. It would wait for its original RabbitMQ
master for 30s and fail, then it gets reset to a standalone cluster.
Here we get some different clusters, so in step (5) and (6), it is
likely to report error in log saying timeout waiting for tables or
fail to merge mnesia database schema, then the those instances get
reset. You can easily re-produce the case by hard resetting power of
all the controllers.<br>
<br>
As you can see, if you are unlucky, there would be several "30s
timeout and reset" before you finally get a healthy RabbitMQ
cluster.<br>
<br>
I find three possible solutions.<br>
A. Using rabbitmqctl force_boot option [6]<br>
It will skips waiting for 30s and resetting cluster, but just assume
the current node is the master and continue to operate. This is
feasible because the original RabbitMQ master would discards the
local state and sync with the new master after it joins a new
cluster [7]. So we can be sure that after step (4) and (6), the
pacemaker determined master instance is started unconditionally, and
it will be the same as RabbitMQ master, and all operations run
without 30s timeout. I find this option is only available in newer
RabbitMQ release, and updating RabbitMQ might introduce other
compatibility problems.<br>
<br>
B. Turn RabbitMQ into cloned instance and use pause_minority instead
of autoheal [8]<br>
This works like MySQL-wss. It let RabbitMQ cluster itself deal with
partition in a manner similar to pacemaker quorum mechanism. When
there is network partition, instances in the minority partition
pauses themselves automatically. Pacemaker does not have to track
who is the RabbitMQ master, who lives longest, who to promote... It
just starts all the clones, done. This leads to huge change in
RabbitMQ resource agent, and the stability and other impact is to be
tested.<br>
<br>
C. Creating a "force_load" file<br>
After reading RabbitMQ source code, I find that the actual thing it
does in solution A is just creating an empty file named "force_load"
in mnesia database dir, then mnesia thinks it is the last node shut
down in the last time and boot itself as the master. This
implementation keeps the same from v3.1.4 to the latest RabbitMQ
master branch. I think we can make use of this little trick. The
change is adding just one line in "try_to_start_rmq_app()" function.<br>
<br>
touch "${MNESIA_FILES}/force_load" && \<br>
chown rabbitmq:rabbitmq "${MNESIA_FILES}/force_load"<br>
<br>
[4] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rabbitmq.com/ha.html">http://www.rabbitmq.com/ha.html</a><br>
[5] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://review.openstack.org/#/c/169291/">https://review.openstack.org/#/c/169291/</a><br>
[6] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html">https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html</a><br>
[7] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rabbitmq.com/partitions.html#recovering">http://www.rabbitmq.com/partitions.html#recovering</a><br>
[8] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.rabbitmq.com/partitions.html#automatic-handling">http://www.rabbitmq.com/partitions.html#automatic-handling</a><br>
<br>
Maybe you have better ideas on this. Please share your thoughts.<br>
<br>
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</style>Best wishes!<br>
Zhou Zheng Sheng / 周征晟 Software Engineer<br>
Beijing AWcloud Software Co., Ltd.<br>
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