Howard Chu writes: > It occurs to me that there is the potential to support an interesting use case > with LMDB when the database resides on remote shared storage. In the context > of slapd, you could run multiple read-only slapds concurrent with a single > read-write slapd on a single database. Not quite... only slap tools open an MDB (or BDB) environment in read-only mode, as far as I can tell. slapd always opens read/write. The "readonly" slapd.conf option only restricts LDAP operations.

Also there's the issue of agreeing who gets to create (and maybe reset?) a lockfile. IIRC that's where people use mkdir for atomic NFS behavior, unless modern NFS fixes that. Though maybe it's enough to omit O_CREAT for the the lockfile in the read-only slapds, if that gets supported.

> The current liblmdb would need a couple small modifications to make this safe > - an option to use fcntl(LOCK) when obtaining a reader slot, and an msync() > when writing to a reader slot, to force reader lock table changes back to the > server before progressing on a read txn. And maybe another sync call for the writer to pick the change up before progressing? OTOH readers may not need to await the msync() if an older reader in the same process is still live.

--On Tuesday, July 09, 2013 12:08 PM -0700 Howard Chu <hyc(a)symas.com&gt; wrote: > Hallvard Breien Furuseth wrote: >> Howard Chu writes: >>> It occurs to me that there is the potential to support an interesting >>> use case with LMDB when the database resides on remote shared storage. >>> In the context of slapd, you could run multiple read-only slapds >>> concurrent with a single read-write slapd on a single database. >> >> Not quite... only slap tools open an MDB (or BDB) environment in >> read-only mode, as far as I can tell. slapd always opens read/write. >> The "readonly" slapd.conf option only restricts LDAP operations. > > We can certainly change this for back-mdb if desired. Add a new config > keyword for this purpose, etc. > >> Also there's the issue of agreeing who gets to create (and maybe reset?) >> a lockfile. IIRC that's where people use mkdir for atomic NFS behavior, >> unless modern NFS fixes that. Though maybe it's enough to omit O_CREAT >> for the the lockfile in the read-only slapds, if that gets supported. > > I would expect the single writing slapd to do all environment > initialization. A reading slapd would require the environment to already > exist. So the downside would be single point of failure for writes? I.e., if the system with the slapd configured for doing writes went down due to hardware or power issues, you'd need to configure one of the other slapds to accept writes, and then update all the clients to use that server.

--On Tuesday, July 09, 2013 1:25 PM -0700 Howard Chu <hyc(a)symas.com&gt; wrote: >> So the downside would be single point of failure for writes? I.e., if the >> system with the slapd configured for doing writes went down due to >> hardware or power issues, you'd need to configure one of the other >> slapds to accept writes, and then update all the clients to use that >> server. > > Yes. We could do this fairly transparently using something like the > chaining overlay. Have it identically configured on all servers, with a > prioritized list of write masters. (Could do this to make mirrormode > easier to setup too.) If the current node is the write master, allow > write ops thru, otherwise chain them to the current write master. Then > clients can send ops to any server they want. Sounds cool to me. :)

It occurs to me that there is the potential to support an interesting use case with LMDB when the database resides on remote shared storage. In the context of slapd, you could run multiple read-only slapds concurrent with a single read-write slapd on a single database.