DDevelopment & Design

[:en] Operational problems with Zookeeper

This post is a summary of what has been presented by Kathleen Ting on StrangeLoop conference. You can watch the original here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Misconfiguration-ZooKeeper I’ve decided to put this selection here for quick reference. …This post is a summary of what has been presented by Kathleen Ting on StrangeLoop conference. You can watch the original here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Misconfiguration-ZooKeeper I’ve decided to put this selection here for quick reference. …

This post is a summary of what has been presented by Kathleen Ting on
StrangeLoop conference. You can watch the original here:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Misconfiguration-ZooKeeper

I’ve decided to put this selection here for quick reference.

Connection mismanagement

  • too many connections 
    WARN [NIOServerCxn.Factory: 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0:2181:NIOServerCnxn$Factory@247] - Too many connections from /xx.x.xx.xxx - max is 60
  • running out of ZK connections?
    • set maxClientCnxns=200 in zoo.cfg
  • HBase client leaking connections?
    • fixed in HBASE-3777, HBASE-4773, HBASE-5466
    • manually close connections
  • connection closes prematurely 
    ERROR: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ZooKeeperConnectionException: HBase is able to connect to ZooKeeper but the connection closes immediately.
  • in hbase-site.xml set hbase.zookeeper.recoverable.waittime=30000ms
  • pig hangs connecting to HBase

    CAUSE: location of ZK quorum is not known to Pig

    • use Pig 10, which includes PIG-2115
    • if there is an overlap between TaskTrackers and ZK quorum nodes
      • set hbase.zookeeper.quorum to final in hbase-site.xml
      • otherwise add hbaze.zoopeeker.quorum=hadoophbasemaster.lan:2181 in pig.properties
WARN org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session 0x0 for server null, unexpected error, closing socket connection and attempting reconnect java.net.ConnectionException: Connection refused!

Time mismanagement

  • client session timed out
INFO org.apache.zookeeper.server.ZooKeeperServer: Expiring session <id>, timeout of 40000ms exceeded
    • ZK and HBase need the same session timeout values
      • zoo.cfg: maxSession=Timeout=180000
      • hbase-site.xml: zookeeper.session.timeout=180000
    • don’t co-locate ZK with IO-intense DataNode or RegionServer
    • specify right amount of heap and tune GC flags
      • turn on parallel/CMS/incremental GC
  •  
  • clients lose connections 
    WARN org.apache.zookeeper.ClientCnxn - Session <id> for server <name>, unexpected error, closing socket connection and attempting reconnect java.io.IOException: Broken pipe
    • don’t use SSD drive for ZK transaction log

Disk management

  • unable to load database – unable to run quorum server 
    FATAL Unable to load database on disk !  java.io.IOException: Failed to process transaction type: 2 error: KeeperErrorCode = NoNode for <file> at org.apache.zookeeper.server.persistence.FileTxnSnapLog.restore(FileTxnSnapLog.java:152)!
    • archive and wipe /var/zookeeper/version-2 if other two ZK servers
      are running
  • unable to load database – unreasonable length exception 
    FATAL Unable to load database on disk java.io.IOException: Unreasonable length = 1048583 at org.apache.jute.BinaryInputArchive.readBuffer(BinaryInputArchive.java:100)
    • server allows a client to set data larger than the server can read from disk
    • if a znode is not readable, increase jute.maxbuffer
      • look for "Packet len <xx> is out of range" in the client log
      • increase it by 20%
      • set in JVMFLAGS="-Djute.maxbuffer=yy" bin/zkCli.sh
      • fixed in ZOOKEEPER-151
  • failure to follow leader 
    WARN org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.Learner: Exception when following the leader java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out

    CAUSE:

    • disk IO contention, network issues
    • ZK snapshot is too large (lots of ZK nodes)

    SOLVE:

    • reduce IO contention by putting dataDir on dedicated spindle
    • increase initLimit on all ZK servers and restart, see
      ZOOKEEPER-1521
    • monitor network

Best Practices

DOs

  • separate spindles for dataDir & dataLogDir
  • allocate 3 or 5 ZK servers
  • tune garbage collection
  • run zkCleanup.sh script via cron

DON’Ts

  • dont’ co-locate ZK with I/O intense DataNode or RegionServer
  • don’t use SSD drive for ZK transaction log

You may use Zookeeper as an observer – a non-voting member:

  • in zoo.cfg 
    peerType=observer

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Private fields and methods are not private in groovy

I used to code in Java before I met groovy. Like most of you, groovy attracted me with many enhancements. This was to my surprise to discover that method visibility in groovy is handled different than Java!

Consider this example:

class Person {
private String name
public  String surname

private Person() {}

private String signature() { "${name?.substring(0, 1)}. $surname" }

public String toString() { "I am $name $surname" }
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How is this class interpreted with Java?

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Let's see how groovy interpretes Person:

public static void main(String[] args) {
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println(person.toString())

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println(person.toString())

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println(person.toString())

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println(person.toString())

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I was really astonished by its output:

I am null null
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I am John null
I am John Foo
I am John Bar
J. Bar

As you can see, groovy does not follow visibility directives at all! It treats them as non-existing. Code compiles and executes fine. It's contrary to Java. In Java this code has several errors, pointed out in comments.

I've searched a bit on this topic and it seems that this behaviour is known since version 1.1 and there is a bug report on that: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-1875. It is not resolved even with groovy 2 release. As Tim Yates mentioned in this Stackoverflow question: "It's not clear if it is a bug or by design". Groovy treats visibility keywords as a hint for a programmer.

I need to keep that lesson in mind next time I want to make some field or method private!

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Context menu or Action buttons ?

Recently I was drawn into one of those UI "religious" disputes that has no easy answers and usually both sides are right. One of our web developers was trying out new web tech (with pretty rich widget library) and started to question himself about some basic usability decisions. The low level problem in this case is usually brought to "which widget should I use ?". I'm not fond of bringing the usability problems to questions: Should I use Tabs over Menu ? Or should I use Context menu instead of buttons panel ? But sometimes if time is crucial factor and other usability levels are by default not addressed at all - better developer that asks those basic questions than developer that do not question himself at all.