Tuning policies

Load balancing policy

The load balancing policy interface consists of three methods:

  • #distance(Host host): determines the distance to the specified host. The values are distance.ignored, distance.local, and distance.remote.
  • #init(client, hosts, callback): initializes the policy. The driver calls this method only once and before any other method calls are made.
  • #newQueryPlan(keyspace, queryOptions, callback): executes a callback with the iterator of hosts to use for a query. Each new query calls this method.

The policies are responsible for yielding a group of nodes in an specific order for the driver to use (if the first node fails, it uses the next one). There are four load-balancing policies implemented in the driver:

  • DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy: a datacenter-aware, round-robin, load-balancing policy. This policy provides round-robin queries over the node of the local datacenter. It also includes in the query plans returned a configurable number of hosts in the remote data centers, but those are always tried after the local nodes.
  • RoundRobinPolicy: a policy that yields nodes in a round-robin fashion.
  • TokenAwarePolicy: a policy that yields replica nodes for a given partition key and keyspace. The token-aware policy uses a child policy to retrieve the next nodes in case the replicas for a partition key are not available.
  • WhiteListPolicy: a policy that wraps the provided child policy but only “allow” hosts from the provided whilelist. Keep in mind however that this policy defeats somewhat the host auto-detection of the driver. As such, this policy is only useful in a few special cases or for testing, but is not optimal in general.

Default load-balancing policy

The default load-balancing policy is the TokenAwarePolicy with DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy as a child policy. It may seem complex but it actually isn’t: The policy yields local replicas for a given key and, if not available, it yields nodes of the local datacenter in a round-robin manner.

Setting the load-balancing policy

To use a load-balancing policy, you pass it in as a clientOptions object to the Client constructor.

// You can specify the local dc relatively to the node.js app
const localDatacenter = 'us-east';
const loadBalancingPolicy = new cassandra.policies.loadBalancing.DCAwareRoundRobinPolicy(localDatacenter); 
const clientOptions = {
   policies : {
      loadBalancing : loadBalancingPolicy
   }
}; 
const client = new cassandra.Client(clientOptions);

Implementing a custom load-balancing policy

The built-in policies in the Node.js driver cover most common use cases. In the rare case that you need to implement your own policy you can do it by inheriting from one of the existent policies or the abstract LoadBalancingPolicy class.

You have to take into account that the same policy is used for all queries in order to yield the hosts in correct order.

The load-balancing policies are implemented using the Iterator Protocol, a convention for lazy iteration allowing to produce only the next value in the series without producing a full Array of values. Under ECMAScript 2015, it enables you to use the new generators.

Example: A policy that selects every node except an specific one.

Note that this policy is a sample and it is not intended for production use. Use datacenter-based policies instead.

function BlackListPolicy(blackListedHost, childPolicy) {
  this.blackListedHost = blackListedHost;
  this.childPolicy = childPolicy;
}

util.inherits(BlackListPolicy, LoadBalancingPolicy);

BlackListPolicy.prototype.init = function (client, hosts, callback) {
  this.client = client;
  this.hosts = hosts;
  //initialize the child policy
  this.childPolicy.init(client, hosts, callback);
};

BlackListPolicy.prototype.getDistance = function (host) {
  return this.childPolicy.getDistance(host);
};

BlackListPolicy.prototype.newQueryPlan = function (keyspace, queryOptions, callback) {
  var self = this;
  this.childPolicy.newQueryPlan(keyspace, queryOptions, function (iterator) {
    callback(self.filter(iterator));
  });
}

BlackListPolicy.prototype.filter = function (childIterator) {
  var self = this;
  return {
    next: function () {
      var item = childIterator.next();
      if (!item.done && item.value.address === self.blackListedHost) {
        // skip
        return this.next();
      }
      return item;
    }
  };
};

Or you can use ES2015 Generators:

BlackListPolicy.prototype.filterES6 = function* (childIterator) {
  for (let host of childIterator) {
    if (host.address === this.blackListedHost) {
      continue;
    }
    yield host;
  }
};

Reconnection policy

The reconnection policy consists of one method:

  • #newSchedule(): creates a new schedule to use in reconnection attempts.

By default, the driver uses an exponential reconnection policy. The driver includes these two policy classes:

  • ConstantReconnectionPolicy
  • ExponentialReconnectionPolicy

Retry policy

A client may send requests to any node in a cluster whether or not it is a replica of the data being queried. This node is placed into the coordinator role temporarily. Which node is the coordinator is determined by the load balancing policy for the cluster. The coordinator is responsible for routing the request to the appropriate replicas. If a coordinator fails during a request, the driver connects to a different node and retries the request. If the coordinator knows before a request that a replica is down, it can throw an UnavailableException, but if the replica fails after the request is made, it throws a TimeoutException. Of course, this all depends on the consistency level set for the query before executing it.

A retry policy centralizes the handling of query retries, minimizing the need for catching and handling of exceptions in your business code.

The retry policy interface consists of four methods:

  • #onReadTimeout(requestInfo, consistency, received, blockFor, isDataPresent): determines what to do when the driver gets a ReadTimeoutException response from a Cassandra node.
  • #onUnavailable(requestInfo, consistency, required, alive): determines what to do when the driver gets an UnavailableException response from a Cassandra node.
  • #onWriteTimeout(requestInfo, consistency, received, blockFor, writeType): determines what to do when the driver gets a WriteTimeoutException response from a Cassandra node
  • #onRequestError(requestInfo, consistency, err): defines whether to retry and at which consistency level on an unexpected error, invoked in the following situations:
    • On a client timeout, while waiting for the server response , being the error an instance of OperationTimedOutError.
    • On a connection error (socket closed, etc.).
    • When the contacted host replies with an error, such as overloaded, isBootstrapping, serverError, etc. In this case, the error is instance of ResponseError

A default and base retry policy is included.