Hi. We've been running a 7-node cluster with RF 3, QUORUM reads/writes in our production environment for a few months. It's been consistently stable during this period, particularly once we got out maintenance strategy fully worked out (per node, one repair a week, one major compaction a week, the latter due to the nature of our data model and usage). While this cluster started, back in June or so, on the 0.7 series, it's been running 0.8.3 for a while now with no issues. We upgraded to 0.8.5 two days ago, having tested the upgrade in our staging cluster (with an otherwise identical configuration) previously and verified that our application's various use cases appeared successful.
One of our nodes suffered a disk failure yesterday. We attempted to replace the dead node by placing a new node at OldNode.initial_token - 1 with auto_bootstrap on. A few things went awry from there: 1. We never saw the new node in bootstrap mode; it became available pretty much immediately upon joining the ring, and never reported a "joining" state. I did verify that auto_bootstrap was on. 2. I mistakenly ran repair on the new node rather than removetoken on the old node, due to a delightful mental error. The repair got nowhere fast, as it attempts to repair against the down node which throws an exception. So I interrupted the repair, restarted the node to clear any pending validation compactions, and... 3. Ran removetoken for the old node. 4. We let this run for some time and saw eventually that all the nodes appeared to be done various compactions and were stuck at streaming. Many streams listed as open, none making any progress. 5. I observed an Rpc-related exception on the new node (where the removetoken was launched) and concluded that the streams were broken so the process wouldn't ever finish. 6. Ran a "removetoken force" to get the dead node out of the mix. No problems. 7. Ran a repair on the new node. 8. Validations ran, streams opened up, and again things got stuck in streaming, hanging for over an hour with no progress. 9. Musing that lingering tasks from the removetoken could be a factor, I performed a rolling restart and attempted a repair again. 10. Same problem. Did another rolling restart and attempted a fresh repair on the most important column family alone. 11. Same problem. Streams included CFs not specified, so I guess they must be for hinted handoff. In concluding that streaming is stuck, I've observed: - streams will be open to the new node from other nodes, but the new node doesn't list them - streams will be open to the other nodes from the new node, but the other nodes don't list them - the streams reported may make some initial progress, but then they hang at a particular point and do not move on for an hour or more. - The logs report repair-related activity, until NPEs on incoming TCP connections show up, which appear likely to be the culprit. I can provide more exact details when I'm done commuting. With streaming broken on this node, I'm unable to run repairs, which is obviously problematic. The application didn't suffer any operational issues as a consequence of this, but I need to review the overnight results to verify we're not suffering data loss (I doubt we are). At this point, I'm considering a couple options: 1. Remove the new node and let the adjacent node take over its range 2. Bring the new node down, add a new one in front of it, and properly removetoken the problematic one. 3. Bring the new node down, remove all its data except for the system keyspace, then bring it back up and repair it. 4. Revert to 0.8.3 and see if that helps. Recommendations? Thanks. - Ethan
