Opened at 2009-02-08T20:28:47Z
Last modified at 2015-02-02T10:55:05Z
#610 new enhancement
upload should take better advantage of existing shares — at Initial Version
Reported by: | warner | Owned by: | |
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Priority: | major | Milestone: | soon |
Component: | code-encoding | Version: | 1.2.0 |
Keywords: | upload verify preservation performance space-efficiency servers-of-happiness | Cc: | tahoe-dev@…, tahoe-lafs.org@… |
Launchpad Bug: |
Description
Our current upload process (which is nearly the oldest code in the entire tahoe tree) could be smarter in the presence of existing shares. If a file is uploaded in January, then a few dozen servers are added in February, then in March it is (for whatever reason) uploaded again, here's what currently happens:
- peer selection comes up with a permuted list of servers, with the same partial ordering as the original list but with the new servers inserted in various pseudo-random places
- each server in the list is asked, in turn, if they would be willing to hold on to the next sequentially numbered share
- each server might say yes or no. In addition, each server will return a list of shares that they might already have
- the client never asks a server to accept a share that it already had a home for, but it also never unasks a server to hold a share that it later learns is housed somewhere else
So, if the client queries a server which already has a share, that server will probably end up with two shares. In addition, many shares will probably end up being sent to a new server even though some other server (later in the permuted list) already has a copy.
To fix this, the upload process needs to do more work:
- it needs to cancel share-upload requests if it later learns that some
other server already has that particular share
- perhaps it should perform some sort of validation on the claimed already-uploaded share
- if it detects any evidence of pre-existing shares, it should put more energy into finding additional ones
- it needs to ask more servers than it strictly needs (for upload purposes) to increase the chance that it can detect this evidence
We're planning an overhaul of immutable upload/download code, both to improve parallelism and to replace the DeferredList with a state machine (to make it easier to bypass stalled servers, for example). These goals should be included in that work.
This process will work best when the shares are closer to the beginning of the permuted list. A "share rebalancing" mechanism should be created to gradually move shares in this direction over time. This is another facet of repair: no only should there be enough shares in existence, but they should be located in the best place for a downloader to find them quickly.