Cassandra nodejs driver time out after a node moves - node.js

We use vnodes on our cluster.
I noticed that when the token space of a node changes (automatically on vnodes, during a repair or a cleanup after adding new nodes), the datastax nodejs driver gets a lot of "Operation timed out - received only X responses" for a few minutes.
I tried using ONE and LOCAL_QUORUM consistencies.
I suppose this is due to the coordinator not hitting the right node just after the move. This seems to be a logical behavior (data was moved) but we really want to address this particular issue.
What do you guys suggest we should do to avoid this ? Having a custom retry policy ? Caching ? Changing the consistency ?
Example of behavior
when we see this:
4/7/2016, 10:43am Info Host 172.31.34.155 moved from '8185241953623605265' to '-1108852503760494577'
We see a spike of those:
{
"message":"Operation timed out - received only 0 responses.",
"info":"Represents an error message from the server",
"code":4608,
"consistencies":1,
"received":0,
"blockFor":1,
"isDataPresent":0,
"coordinator":"172.31.34.155:9042",
"query":"SELECT foo FROM foo_bar LIMIT 10"
}

I suppose this is due to the coordinator not hitting the right node just after the move. This seems to be a logical behavior (data was moved) but we really want to address this particular issue.
In fact, when adding new node, there will be token range movement but Cassandra can still serve read requests using the old token ranges until the scale out has finished completely. So the behavior you're facing is very suspicious.
If you can reproduce this error, please activate query tracing to narrow down the issue.
The error can also be related to a node under heavy load and not replying fast enough

Related

Why does a Cassandra node get picked as coordinator even when the driver keeps throwing OperationTimedOutException?

I set up a Cassandra cluster with several coordinator nodes.
Sometimes one of the coordinator nodes becomes unavailable...my code handles this with a retry policy which moves to the next node and the problem is solved.
However, it seems that the problematic node still receives traffic even if the driver keeps throwing OperationTimedOutException...it is a time consuming since this node useless.
Further details:
Cassandra Driver -
I'm using Cassandra driver version 3.11.0 (cassandra-driver-core-3.11.0.jar)
Loading balancing policy -
I didn't set any load balancing policy - thus, the default is used.
Retry Policy -
I implemented my own retry policy -
In case of read/write timeout or unavailable retry cause - I'm using retry while reducing the consistency level to one. In case of request error - I'm trying a different host.
Is there anyway to configure that if the driver keeps throwing OperationTimedOutException while sending query to a specific coordinator node, this node will not be called for some period of time?
Cassandra client connection does the Cassandra co-ordinator node caching. So, It will continue sending the query to the same node. Tune your application layer socket config with the client connection timeout.
SocketOptions options = new SocketOptions();
options.setConnectTimeoutMillis(30000);
options.setReadTimeoutMillis(30000);
options.setTcpNoDelay(true);
There are a few misconceptions in your question so let me begin by correcting them.
Misconception #1
I set up a Cassandra cluster with several coordinator nodes.
All nodes in a Cassandra cluster are the same. This is one of the attributes that makes Cassandra awesome. Any node in the cluster can be picked as a coordinator. You can NOT configure/nominate/setup a node to be a coordinator while others aren't.
Misconception #2
... if a coordinator node keeps throwing OperationTimedOutException ...
Cassandra nodes are not capable of throwing OperationTimedOutException. OperationTimedOutException is a client-side exception which gets thrown by the driver when it doesn't get a response from a coordinator within the configured client timeout period.
It is a different exception from read or write timeout exceptions which are thrown when the coordinator sends a response back to the driver when a read or write request timed out on the server-side.
Picking nodes
You didn't specify which driver + version you're using. OperationTimedOutException is in Java driver v3.x but not in v4.x (it was replaced with DriverTimeoutException which makes it clearer that the exception is client-side) so for the purposes of my response, I'm going to assume that you're using Java driver v3.11 (latest in the v3 series).
You also didn't specify which load balancing policies (LBP) you've configured and which retry policies. If you're using the latency-aware LBP LatencyAwarePolicy, the likely scenario is that the problematic node has the lowest latency so it is listed as the "preferred node" by the policy.
Handling misbehaving nodes is a very tough thing to do for the drivers, particularly if the nodes are unresponsive because a driver won't know what is really going on if a node doesn't respond at all. The drivers can't be too aggressive at marking nodes as "down" because if the node is just temporarily unavailable (for example, due to a GC pause), it won't get picked again as a coordinator for a bit of time.
Sometimes, the latency "signal" from a problematic node takes a while to bubble up for a driver to effectively route around it because of the algorithm used by the driver to average out the reported latencies over a period of one or two minutes, scaled such that older latencies are weighted less than newer latencies. In the case of an unresponsive node, the driver can only base the average/scaling on the last time the node reported its latency.
For this reason, the LatencyAwarePolicy was dropped in Java driver v4 in preference for the new DefaultLoadBalancingPolicy which has a much better detection algorithm for slow replicas.
Your workaround using tryNextHost() is a bit clunky because you have to effectively wait for the retry policy to kick in. What you really need to focus on is the fact that your nodes become unresponsive. If your cluster is getting overloaded, you should consider increasing the capacity by adding more nodes.
Trying to come up with a software solution for what is an infrastructure capacity issue is never going to be successful in the long run. Cheers!

com.datastax.driver.core.Metadata:getHosts() returning incorrect state

Any reason why com.datastax.driver.core.Metadata:getHosts() would return state UP for a host that has shutdown?
However, nodetool status returns DN for that host.
No matter how many times I check Host.getState(), it still says UP for that dead host.
This is how I'm querying Metadata:
cluster = DseCluster.builder()
.addContactPoints("192.168.1.1", "192.168.1.2", "192.168.1.3")
.withPort(9042)
.withReconnectionPolicy(new ConstantReconnectionPolicy(2000))
.build();
cluster.getMetadata().getAllHosts();
EDIT: Updated code to reflect I'm trying to connect to 3 hosts. I should've stated that the cluster I'm connecting has 3 nodes, 2 in DC1 and another in DC2.
Also, whenever I relaunch my Java process running this code, the behavior changes. Sometimes it gives me the right states, then when I restart it again, it gives me the wrong states, and so on.
I will post an answer which I got from the datastaxacademy slack:
Host.getState() is the driver's view of what it thinks the host
state is, where nodetool status is what that C* node thinks the
state of all nodes in the clusters are from its view (propagated via
gossip) There is not a way to get that via the driver

Cassandra timeout during write query but entry present in Datebase

We are using Cassandra 3.0 on our system. For insertion in the db, we are using the Datastax C# driver.
We have a query regarding the timeout and retry during insertion. We faced an instance where a timeout during insert was thrown yet there is that entry present in the database. All are settings are default in the Cassandra.yaml file as well as in the driver.
How can we know the actual status of the insert even if there is a timeout? If there was a timeout thrown, how could possibly the insert have gone through ahead? Whether the insert was successful or there was some default retry policy in place that was applied, we don't have any tangible answer on it currently and we need to know exactly about that.
How do we make sure that the status of that insertion was actually successful/failed with or without the timeout?
A write timeout is not necessarily a failure to write, moreover it's a notification that not enough replicas acknowledged the write within a time period. The write will still eventually happen on all replicas.
If you do observe a write timeout, it indicates that not enough replicas responded for the configured consistency level within the configured write_request_timeout_in_ms value in cassandra.yaml, the default being 2 seconds. Keep in mind however that the write will still happen.
The coordinating Cassandra node responsible for that write sends write mutations to all replicas and responds to the client as soon as enough have replied or the timeout is reached. Because of this, if you get a WriteTimeoutException you should assume the write happened. If any of the replicas are down, the coordinator maintains a hint for that write, which will be delivered to the replica when it becomes available again.
Cassandra also employs Read Repairs and Operators should run recurring Repairs to help keep data consistent.
If your operations are idempotent, you can simply retry the write until it succeeds. Or you can attempt to read the data back to make sure the write was processed. However, depending on your application requirements, you may not need to employ these strategies and you can safely assume the write did or will happen.
Please note on the other hand that unavailable errors (i.e. Not enough replicas available at consistency level X) indicate that not enough replicas were available to perform a write and therefore the write is never attempted.

Cassandra Nodes Going Down

I have a 3 node Cassandra cluster setup (replication set to 2) with Solr installed, each node having RHEL, 32 GB Ram, 1 TB HDD and DSE 4.8.3. There are lots of writes happening on my nodes and also my web application reads from my nodes.
I have observed that all the nodes go down after every 3-4 days. I have to do a restart of every node and then they function quite well till the next 3-4 days and again the same problem repeats. I checked the server logs but they do not show any error even when the server goes down. I am unable to figure out why is this happening.
In my application, sometimes when I connect to the nodes through the C# Cassandra driver, I get the following error
Cassandra.NoHostAvailableException: None of the hosts tried for query are available (tried: 'node-ip':9042) at Cassandra.Tasks.TaskHelper.WaitToComplete(Task task, Int32 timeout) at Cassandra.Tasks.TaskHelper.WaitToComplete[T](Task``1 task, Int32 timeout) at Cassandra.ControlConnection.Init() at Cassandra.Cluster.Init()`
But when I check the OpsCenter, none of the nodes are down. All nodes status show perfectly fine. Could this be a problem with the driver? Earlier I was using Cassandra C# driver version 2.5.0 installed from nuget, but now I updated even that to version 3.0.3 still this errors persists.
Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
If you haven't done so already, you may want to look at setting your logging levels to default by running: nodetool -h 192.168.XXX.XXX setlogginglevel org.apache.cassandra DEBUG on all your nodes
Your first issue is most likely an OutOfMemory Exception.
For your second issue, the problem is most likely that you have really long GC pauses. Tailing /var/log/cassandra/debug.log or /var/log/cassandra/system.log may give you a hint but typically doesn't reveal the problem unless you are meticulously looking at the timestamps. The best way to troubleshoot this is to ensure you have GC logging enabled in your jvm.options config and then tail your gc logs taking note of the pause times:
grep 'Total time for which application threads were stopped:' /var/log/cassandra/gc.log.1 | less
The Unexpected exception during request; channel = [....] java.io.IOException: Error while read (....): Connection reset by peer error is typically inter-node timeouts. i.e. The coordinator times out waiting for a response from another node and sends a TCP RST packet to close the connection.

Cassandra 2.1.2 node stuck on joining the cluster

I'm trying but failing to join a new (well old, but wiped out) node to an existing cluster.
Currently cluster consists of 2 nodes and runs C* 2.1.2. I start a third node with 2.1.2, it gets to joining state, it bootstraps, i.e. streams some data as shown by nodetool netstats, but after some time, it gets stuck. From that point nothing gets streamed, the new node stays in joining state. I restarted node twice, everytime it streamed more data, but then got stuck again. (I'm currently on a third round like that).
Other facts:
I don't see any errors in the log on any of the nodes.
The connectivity seems fine, I can ping, netcat to port 7000 all ways.
I have 267 GB load per running node, replication 2, 16 tokens.
Load of a new node is around 100GBs now
I'm guessing that the node after few rounds of restarts, will finally suck in all of the data from running nodes and join the cluster. But definitely it's not the way it should work.
EDIT: I discovered some more info:
The bootstrapping process stops in the middle of streaming some table, always after sending exactly 10MB of some SSTable, e.g.:
$ nodetool netstats | grep -P -v "bytes\(100"
Mode: NORMAL
Bootstrap e0abc160-7ca8-11e4-9bc2-cf6aed12690e
/192.168.200.16
Sending 516 files, 124933333900 bytes total
/home/data/cassandra/data/leadbullet/page_view-2a2410103f4411e4a266db7096512b05/leadbullet-page_view-ka-13890-Data.db 10485760/167797071 bytes(6%) sent to idx:0/192.168.200.16
Read Repair Statistics:
Attempted: 2016371
Mismatch (Blocking): 0
Mismatch (Background): 168721
Pool Name Active Pending Completed
Commands n/a 0 55802918
Responses n/a 0 425963
I can't diagnose the error & I'll be grateful for any help!
Try to telnet from one node to another using correct port.
Make sure you are joining the correct name cluster.
Try use: nodetool repair
You might be pinging the external IP addressed, and your cluster communicates using internal IP addresses.
If you are running on Amazon AWS, make sure you have firewall open on both internal IP addresses.

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