ReleaseNotes1411
Date: 2012-1-16
Download Link:
http://memcached.org/files/old/memcached-1.4.11.tar.gz
Memcached 1.4.11. Fixes race conditions and crashes introduced in 1.4.10. Adds the ability to rebalance and reassign slab memory.
- bug237: Don't compute incorrect argc for timedrun
- fix 'age' stat for stats items
- binary deletes were not ticking stats counters
- Fix a race condition from 1.4.10 on item_remove
- close some idiotic race conditions
- initial slab automover
- slab reassignment
- clean do_item_get logic a bit. fix race.
- clean up the do_item_alloc logic
- shorten lock for item allocation more
- Fix to build with cyrus sasl 2.1.25
Slab page reassignment and bug fixes over 1.4.10.
There were some race conditions and logic errors introduced in 1.4.10, they should be rare, but users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
Long running instances of memcached may run into an issue where all available memory has been assigned to a specific slab class (say items of roughly size 100 bytes). Later the application starts storing more of its data into a different slab class (items around 200 bytes). Memcached could not use the 100 byte chunks to satisfy the 200 byte requests, and thus you would be able to store very few 200 byte items.
1.4.11 introduces the ability to reassign slab pages. This is a beta feature and the commands may change for the next few releases, so please keep this in mind. When the commands are finalized they will be noted in the release notes.
Slab reassignment can only be enabled at start time:
Once all memory has been assigned and used by items, you may use a command to
reassign memory.
```$ echo "slabs reassign 1 4" | nc localhost 11211}}}
That will return an error code indicating success, or a need to retry later.
Success does not mean that the slab was moved, but that a background thread
will attempt to move the memory as quickly as it can.
#### Slab Automove
While slab reassign is a manual feature, there is also the start of an
automatic memory reassignment algorithm.
```$ memcached -o slab_reassign,slab_automove}}}
The above enables it on startup. slab_automove requires slab_reassign first be
enabled.
automove itself may also be enabled or disabled at runtime:
```$ echo "slabs automove 0" | nc localhost 11211}}}
The algorithm is slow and conservative. If a slab class is seen as having the
highest eviction count 3 times 10 seconds apart, it will take a page from a
slab class which has had zero evictions in the last 30 seconds and move the
memory.
There are lots of cases where this will not be sufficient, and we invite the
community to help improve upon the algorithm. Included in the source directory
is `scripts/mc_slab_mover`. See perldoc for more information:
```$ perldoc ./scripts/mc_slab_mover}}}
It implements the same algorithm as built into memcached, and you may modify
it to better suit your needs and improve on the script or port it to other
languages. Please provide patches!
#### Slab Reassign Implementation
Slab page reassignment requires some tradeoffs:
* All items larger than 500k (even if they're under 730k) take 1MB of space
* When memory is reassigned, all items that were in the 1MB page are evicted
* When slab reassign is enabled, an extra background thread is used
The first item will be improved in later releases, and is avoided if you start
memcached without the -o slab_reassign option.
#### New Stats
STAT slab_reassign_running 0 STAT slabs_moved 0
slab_reassign_running indicates if the slab thread is attempting to move a
page. It may need to wait for some memory to free up, so it could take several
seconds.
slabs_moved is simply a count of how many pages have been successfully moved.
### Contributors
The following people contributed to this release since 1.4.10.
Note that this is based on who contributed changes, not how they were
done. In many cases, a code snippet on the mailing list or a bug
report ended up as a commit with your name on it.
Note that this is just a summary of how many changes each person made
which doesn't necessarily reflect how significant each change was.
For details on what led up into a branch, either grab the git repo and
look at the output of `git log 1.4.10..1.4.11` or use a web view.
* Repo list: https://github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki/DevelopmentRepos
* Web View: http://github.com/memcached/memcached/commits/1.4.11
15 dormando
1 Dustin Sallings
1 Steve Wills