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Re: Balancing and proxing

From: Roman Naumenko <roman_at_naumenko.ca>
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 22:51:10 -0400

Ryan Schmidt said the following, on 09-08-13 9:15 PM:
> On Aug 9, 2013, at 19:00, Roman Naumenko wrote:
>> Ryan Schmidt said the following, on 09-08-13 7:12 PM:
>>> You can configure any number of read-only slaves which maintain copies of the master repository with a very slight delay. The mirroring and keeping in sync would be accomplished using svnsync. To access the repositories, users would use the hostname of a mirror near to them. For read operations, they would occur on the mirror and therefore be faster than accessing the farther-away master. For write operations, you configure the mirror to proxy those requests back to the master. (Search for "write-through proxy" for more on this.) In this way the users only need to know the address of their closest mirror; they do not need to know which is the master or to know its address.
>> I wanted to have universal URL, which might resolve to different IP based on location - for performance.
> I'm not familiar with how to set that up at the DNS level but if you are then go for it.
Views in bind or something similar, DNS server will reply with IP that
depends on the request's originating network.

>> But more important, I'd like to have a few nodes handling writes.
>>
>> Ah yes. Well then that's different.
>>
>> You must have one heck of a large svn installation for that to be a bottleneck.

One day it might grow there, but even with the moderate load it is still a huge convenience when pair or more frontends available to handle the load, can take one down for maintenance any time. VMs can be used instead of physical box too and sized more adequately.

Of course, it would be ideal if subversion nodes could just share a
storage, so any sort of requests from a load balancer can processed by
any node without need to replicate changes over network.

>>>> Of course, it would be ideal if subversion nodes could just share a
>>>> storage, so any sort of requests from a load balancer can processed by
>>>> any node without need to replicate changes over network.
>>> If your storage is robust (i.e. a cluster filesystem, such as Xsan) and you want to run multiple Subversion servers that each have access to the same repositories on the same storage, then yes, you can do that instead.
>> The storage is robust enough - NetApp or possibly SAN with all enterprise bells and whistles.
> It would need to be not just a SAN but a SAN with a cluster filesystem, based on previous conversations (see below).
Yeah, of course - SAN storage will require own layer to handle data
sharing.
Few mentioned GFS worked.
>> Ok, so if multiple nodes are accessing the same mount point with repos data, will they be able to handle writes from multiple clients correctly? Thinking out loud: yes, they should - since it's no difference for a repository if multiple clients commiting over same server or few distributed nodes. Or is it different when the same process handles all requests?
> I have not set it up myself, but I participated in discussions about it on this list some years ago:
>
> http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2006-10/0195.shtml
>
> http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2007-05/0214.shtml
>
> You may want to read those threads completely and carefully to get all the nuances. And of course information may have changed since then.
Tom Mornini <tmornini_at_engineyard.com> confirmed that GFS works in
that thread and the other too,
http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2007-01/1307.shtml
But again, there is no "official" confirmation or reference architecture.

It seems like the number of repositories or the load on a server is
never large enough to make administrators (or subversion developers to
some extent) designing or implementing load-balancing cluster. Or maybe
it is close to huge, but in most cases svnsycn + write-though solve the
problem.
On the other side, there are commercial solutions available, so demand
must be there :)

--Roman
Received on 2013-08-10 04:51:46 CEST

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