
Large messages in large clusters
================================

Author: Bela Ban
Version: $Id: LargeMessages.txt,v 1.3 2009/05/15 10:39:35 belaban Exp $

Requirements
------------
- Large cluster
- 1 sender, many receivers
- Sender sends messages between 10MB and 200MB, in bursts

Goals:
------
- Receivers discard message (purge it from memory) as soon as it has been delivered to the application
- Sender discards message as soon as it has received acks from all receivers or a timeout has elapsed
--> We don't want to keep 200MB messages in buffers longer than necessary
- Don't allow single receiver to bog down the whole cluster (in times and memory foot print)


Issues with existing protocols:
-------------------------------
- We cannot use STABLE for agreement, so that a sender can purge a message, because one or more slow receivers could
  prevent stability messages to be sent. This is because STABLE requires agreement from all group members, and slow
  members won't be able to agree, at least not fast enough.
- We therefore wait for agreement from all members, but if a timeout elapses, the sender will purge the message anyway
- Receivers are not guaranteed to receive all messages: if the sender purged a message after not having received acks
  from all members, the receiver will not receive that message
- However, even with message loss, all *received* messages will be delivered in order
- We cannot use SMACK, which uses positive acks for each message, because that would lead to too many acks. If we for
  example send a 200MB message and it is fragmented into 2000 fragments, we don't want to send an ack / fragment, but
  we only want to send an ack per message, so after the entire 200MB message has been received

Design:
-------
- A new protocol ACK, layered above FRAG2 (or any other fragmentation protocol)
- When sending a message, ACK creates a list of members from which it needs to receive acks and starts a timer
- When ACK receives a message it sends an ack back to the sender
- When all acks have been received, ACK sends down a STABLE event, which will cause the sender's NAKACK protocol to
  purge the message
- When the timer kicks in, it returns if all acks have been received or (if not) sends a stability message around,
  which causes all receivers to ask for retransmission of messages they haven't received yet. The timer cancels itself
  after N attempts or when all acks have been received
- The receivers also start a timer when the first retransmission of a message occurs
- If a message has not been received after a timeout, the receivers will flag that message as not-received and stop
  retransmission requests for it. When the special not-received message is removed, it won't be passed up


Flow control:
-------------

- We cannot have a sender block on a credit missing from a slow member
- Solution: use max_block_times in FC, which is already implemented
