Grapevine

Gossip protocol for Elixir

Grapevine implements the rumor mongering and anti-entropy gossip procotols.

The anti-entropy protocol is the simplest and the peers will eventually converge to the same state. All the message are kept in memory forever. That's something to improve and the grapevine API will support the garbage collection of this messages.

The SIR model (complex epidemics/rumor mongering) and the variant feedback/counter. Each update can have one of three states: susceptible, infected and removed. If a new update is added it will be handled by each instance and you can process and/or ignore the update. The handle can be used to check if a node is added to the network and you might want to sync the new node. The updates are stored in memory until they become removed and the time to live hasn't expired. If the garbage collector is triggered then the updates will be removed.

The options can have an impact on the consistency because the rumor mongering protocols cannot guarantee the delivery to every instance. With the right configuration, the probability of such an event is very low but is never zero.

Gossip Protocols

The two modules available are:

• Grapevine.Gossip.Rumor
• Grapevine.Gossip.Entropy

Installation

defp deps do
  [{:grapevine, "~> 0.2"}]
end

Configuration

Required opts:

• membership_module - The module responsible for the membership. The Grapevine.Node is the module to use if you want to track the nodeup and nodedown info messages. This can be done with the Grapevine.Handler that will receive these changes.
• membership_opts - The membership module options.

Optional opts:

• name - The name of the gossip process. The default name is Grapevine.Gossip.
• delta - The timeout for each gossip cycle. Default 500.

Optional opts for rumor mongering:

• rounds - The number of rounds for the feedback. Default 3.
• level - The number of nodes randomly selected for each cycle, 0 to select all nodes. Default 1.
• gc - The interval in milliseconds for the garbage collector, false disables gc. Default 1000.
• ttl - The time to live in milliseconds for removed messages. Default 30000.

Example

In the example folder you can find a dummy handler used with grapevine.

defmodule SomeHandler do
  use Grapevine.Handler
   
  def push(received_values, stored_values) do
    # do something with these values, filter or ignore
    :ok
  end
end

opts = [
  name: :gossip
  membership_module: Grapevine.Node,
  membership_opts: [
    mfa: {Grapevine, :add, [:gossip]}
  ]
]

Grapevine.start(Grapevine.Gossip.Entropy, Grapevine.DummyHandler, opts)
Grapevine.add(:gossip, "id1", %{value: 101, id: "1"})

License

MIT