How does StackExchange.Redis use multiple endpoints and connections? - redis

As explained in the StackExchange.Redis Basics documentation, you can connect to multiple Redis servers, and StackExchange.Redis will automatically determine the master/slave setup. Quoting the relevant part:
A more complicated scenario might involve a master/slave setup; for this usage, simply specify all the desired nodes that make up that logical redis tier (it will automatically identify the master):
ConnectionMultiplexer redis = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("server1:6379,server2:6379");
I performed a test in which I triggered a failover, such that the master would go down for a bit, causing the old slave to become the new master, and the old master to become the new slave. I noticed that in spite of this change, StackExchange.Redis keeps sending commands to the old master, causing write operations to fail.
Questions on the above:
How does StackExchange.Redis decide which endpoint to use?
How should multiple endpoints (as in the above example) be used?
I also noticed that for each connect, StackExchange.Redis opens two physical connections, one of which is some sort of subscription. What is this used for exactly? Is it used by Sentinel instances?

What should happen there is that it uses a number of things (in particular the defined replication configuration) to determine which is the master, and direct traffic at the appropriate server (respecting the "server" parameter, which defaults to "prefer master", but which always sends write operations to a master).
If a "cannot write to a readonly slave" (I can't remember the exact text) error is received, it will try to re-establish the configuration, and should switch automatically to respect this. Unfortunately, redis does not broadcast configuration changes, so the library can't detect this ahead of time.
Note that if you use the library methods to change master, it can exploit pub/sub to detect that change immediately and automatically.
Re the second connection: that would be for pub/sub; it spins this up ahead of time, as by default it attempts to listen for the library-specific configuration broadcasts.

Related

Redis Cluster vs Twemproxy - MOVED responses

I want to use Redis for a particular use case. I am not sure to go with a Redis Cluster or with Twemproxy + Sentinel.
I know the Cluster is a winner any day. I am just skeptical due to the MOVED responses. In case of MOVED responses, the client will connect another node and in case of resharding, it may have to connect another again. But in case of Twem, it knows where the data is residing, so it will never get a MOVED response.
There are different problems with Twem, like added hop, may increase overall turnaround time, problem with adding new nodes or if it ejects some nodes out, it won't be able to serve the requests for the keys present on that node. Extra maintenance headache as in, having sentinels for my Redis instances and mechanism for HA of twem itself.
Can anyone suggest me, should I go with Twem or Cluster? I am thinking of going with Twem as I will not be going to and fro in case of MOVED responses. But I am skeptical about it, considering the above mentioned concerns.
P.S. I am planning to using Jedis client for Redis (if that helps).
First of all, I'm not familiar with Twemproxy, so I'll only talk about your concerns on Redis Cluster.
Redis client can get the complete slot-node mapping, i.e. the location of keys, from Redis Cluster. It can cache the mapping on the client side, and sends request to the right node. So most of the time, it won't be redirected, i.e. get the MOVED message.
However, if you add/delete node or reshard the data set, client will receive MOVED message, since it still uses the old mapping. In this case, client can update its local cache, and any subsequent requests will be sent to the right node, i.e. no MOVED message any more.
A decent client library can take the above optimization to make it more efficient. So if your client library has this optimization, you don't need to worry about the MOVED penalty.

How to SET on specific redis server with StackExchange.Redis client?

I have 3 redis servers running in docker containers. From redis-cli I can SET on specific server.
SET myValue 100
How can I do this with StackExchange.Redis client?
I don't see anything in server api that allows to do that. Bear in mind that I don't know much about Redis at all.
var connection = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("localhost:6379,localhost:6380,localhost:6381");
var server = connection.GetServer("localhost", 6381);
server.???
SE.Redis expects to be managing a single logical keyspace; the support for multiple nodes is intended either for master/replica setups, or for redis-cluster (although, in the case of cluster, node discovery is achieved via the redis API, so a single node would be fine if it is reachable). With that in place: the selection of servers is implicit from the operation (i.e. writes need to go to a master, and in the case of "cluster", the keyspace shard mapping should be applied).
If you want to write to separate servers as though they are separate databases, you should use a connection per server; not a single connection that spans them all. Right now, SE.Redis is probably detecting 3 master nodes and electing to use one of them arbitrarily. You can see what it thinks by passing a TextWriter to the Connect/ConnectAsync method.

Redis active-active replication

I am using redis version 2.8.3. I want to build a redis cluster. But in this cluster there should be multiple master. This means I need multiple nodes that has write access and applying ability to all other nodes.
I could build a cluster with a master and multiple slaves. I just configured slaves redis.conf files and added that ;
slaveof myMasterIp myMasterPort
Thats all. Than I try to write something into db via master. It is replicated to all slaves and I really like it.
But when I try to write via a slave, it told me that slaves have no right to write. After that I just set read-only status of slave in redis.conf file to false. Hence, I could write something into db.
But I realize that, it is not replicated to my master replication so it is not replicated to all other slave neigther.
This means I could'not build an active-active cluster.
I tried to find something whether redis has active-active cluster capability. But I could not find exact answer about it.
Is it available to build active-active cluster with redis?
If it is, How can I do it ?
Thank you!
Redis v2.8.3 does not support multi-master setups. The real question, however, is why do you want to set one up? Put differently, what challenge/problem are you trying to solve?
It looks like the challenge you're trying to solve is how to reduce the network load (more on that below) by eliminating over-the-net reads. Since Redis isn't multi-master (yet), the only way to do it is by setting up each app server with a master and a slave (to the other master) - i.e. grand total of 4 Redis instances (and twice the RAM).
The simple scenario is when each app updates only a mutually-exclusive subset of the database's keys. In that scenario this kind of setup may actually be beneficial (at least in the short term). If, however, both apps can touch all keys or if even just one key is "shared" for writes between the apps, then you'll need to bake locking/conflict resolution/etc... logic into your apps to consolidate local master and slave differences (and that may be a bit of an overkill). In either case, however, you'll end up with too many (i.e. more than 1) Redises, which means more admin effort at the very least.
Also note that by colocating app and database on the same server you're setting yourself for near-certain scalability failure. What will happen when you need more compute resources for your apps or Redis? How will you add yet another app server to the mix?
Which brings me back to the actual problem you are trying to solve - network load. Why exactly is that an issue? Are your apps so throughput-heavy or is the network so thin that you are willing to go to such lengths? Or maybe latency is the issue that you want to resolve? Be the case as it may be, I recommended that you consider a time-proven design instead, namely separating Redis from the apps and putting it on its own resources. True, network will hit you in the face and you'll have to work around/with it (which is what everybody else does). On the other hand, you'll have more flexibility and control over your much simpler setup and that, in my book, is a huge gain.
Redis Enterprise has had this feature for quite a while, but if you are looking for an open source solution KeyDB is a fork with Active Active support (called Active Replica).
Setting it up is just a little more work than standard replication:
Both servers must have "active-replica yes" in their respective configuration files
On server B execute the command "replicaof [A address] [A port]"
Server B will drop its database and load server A's dataset
On server A execute the command "replicaof [B address] [B port]"
Server A will drop its database and load server B's dataset (including the data it just transferred in the prior step)
Both servers will now propagate writes to each other. You can test this by writing to a key on Server A and ensuring it is visible on B and vice versa.
https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB/wiki/KeyDB-(Redis-Fork):-Active-Replica-Support

Redis Pub/Sub Usefulness?

I have a question that is bugging me quite heavily. What is the Redis pub/sub feature actually used for? I can only think of inter-process communication over TCP (either locally or distributed), however not much else.
Can someone please prove me wrong.
It's an easy way to plug into an event stream, generally between processes or machines. For instance, an user creates a published event. One process handles updating the database from the event, another updates user stats, another global stats, another updates the text search database, etc. They're all loosely coupled by subscribing to the channel. You can add new processes for testing updates and monitoring the system. It's a little different from a message queue in that there's no storing messages until they're processed, but Redis has other structures for those sorts of jobs.
a real use case in my experience.
Lets say you have a web application deployed on 4 different servers(nodes,virtual machines) mostly on your virtual private cloud.
The web application maintains an in memory java map for its static data cache which occasionally changes .
Now every time the data changes in your database you would need all your servers to update there own in memory caches,this is the problem.
one way is to maintain all the static data in redis or any other cache on a separate server and the cache updates based on a scheduler.But here to access the static content which occasionally changes you need a scheduler and a separate cache server like redis or memcached etc. and each server points to this external cache.
Using pubsub of redis here:
all servers subscribe to redis channel and if redis publishes the message when ever there is an update,addition,deletion of the data as a message to all of its subscribers.On receiving the message object and its type of update(ADD,REMOVED,UPDATED) each server updates its in memory static data map.

How to approach wcf services synchronization?

I have implemented a wcf service and now, my client wants it to have three copies of it, working independently on different machines. A master-slave approach. I need to find a solution that will enable behavior:
the first service that is instantiated "asks" the other two "if they are alive?" - if no, then it becomes a master and it is the one that is active on the net. The other two, once instantiated see that there is already a master alive, so they became slaves and start sleeping. There needs to be some mechanisms to periodically check if master is not dead and if so, choses the next copy that is alive to became a master (until it becomes dead respectively)
This i think should be a kind of an architectural pattern, so I would be more than glad to be given any advices.
thanks
I would suggest looking at the WCF peer channel (System.Net.PeerToPeer) to facilitate each node knowing about the other nodes. Here is a link that offers a decent introduction.
As for determining which node should be the master, the trick will be negotiating which node should be the master if two or more nodes come online at about the same time. Once the nodes become aware of each other, there needs to be some deterministic mechanism for establishing the master. For example, you could use the earliest creation time, the lowest value of the last octet of each node's IP address, or anything really. You'll just need to define some scheme that allows the nodes to negotiate this automatically.
Finally, as for checking if the master is still alive, I would suggest using the event-based mechanism described here. The master could send out periodic health-and-status events that the other nodes would register for. I'd put a try/catch/finally block at the code entry point so that if the master were to crash, it could publish one final MasterClosing event to let the slaves know it's going away. What this does not account for is a system crash, e.g., power failure, etc. To handle this, provide a timeout in the slaves so that when the timeout expires, the slaves can query the master to see if it's still there. If not, the slaves can negotiate between themselves using your deterministic algorithm about who should be the next master.