What if we tell you that there is a sure way to get IST not SST for node rejoins? You can guarantee that a new node rejoins using IST. Sound interesting? Keep reading.

Normally when a node is taken out of the cluster for a short period of time (for maintenance or shutdown), gcache on other nodes of the cluster help donate the missing write-set(s) when the node rejoins. This approach works if you have configured a larger gcache, or the downtime is short enough. Both approaches aren’t good, especially for a production cluster. Also, a larger gcache for the server lifetime means blocking larger disk-space when the same job can be done with relative smaller disk-space.

Re-configuring gcache, on a potential DONOR node before downtime requires a node …

In this blog, we’ll look at how improvements to Percona XtraDB Cluster improved IST performance.

Introduction

Starting in version 5.7.17-29.20 of Percona XtraDB Cluster significantly improved performance. Depending on the workload, the increase in throughput is in the range of 3-10x. (More details here). These optimization fixes also helped improve IST (Incremental State Transfer) performance. This blog is aimed at studying the IST impact.

IST

IST stands for incremental state transfer. When a node of the cluster leaves the cluster for a short period of time and then rejoins the cluster it needs to catch-up with cluster state. As part of this sync …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how Percona XtraDB Cluster uses IST.

Introduction

Percona XtraDB Cluster uses the concept of an Incremental State Transfer (IST). When a node of the cluster leaves the cluster for a short period of time, it can rejoin the cluster by getting the delta set of missing changes from any active node in the cluster.

This process of getting the delta set of changes is named as IST in Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Tracking IST Progress

The number of write-sets/changes that the joining node needs to catch up on when rejoining the cluster is dictated by:

1. The duration the node was not present in the cluster
…

Beware the SST

In Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) I often run across users who are fearful of SSTs on their clusters. I’ve always maintained that if you can’t cope with a SST, PXC may not be right for you, but that doesn’t change the fact that SSTs with multiple Terabytes of data can be quite costly.

SST, by current definition, is a full backup of a Donor to Joiner.  The most popular method is Percona XtraBackup, so we’re talking about a donor node that must:

1. Run a full XtraBackup that reads its entire datadir
2. Keep up with Galera replication to it as much as possible (though laggy donors don’t send flow control)
3. Possibly still be serving application traffic if you don’t remove Donors from rotation.
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