Introduction

There are several features that affect the behavior of ZEO. This section describes how a few of these features work. Subsequent sections describe how to configure every option.

Client cache

Each ZEO client keeps an on-disk cache of recently used data records to avoid fetching those records from the server each time they are requested. It is usually faster to read the objects from disk than it is to fetch them over the network. The cache can also provide read-only copies of objects during server outages.

The cache may be persistent or transient. If the cache is persistent, then the cache files are retained for use after process restarts. A non-persistent cache uses temporary files that are removed when the client storage is closed.

The client cache size is configured when the ClientStorage is created. The default size is 20MB, but the right size depends entirely on the particular database. Setting the cache size too small can hurt performance, but in most cases making it too big just wastes disk space.

ZEO uses invalidations for cache consistency. Every time an object is modified, the server sends a message to each client informing it of the change. The client will discard the object from its cache when it receives an invalidation. (It’s actually a little more complicated, but we won’t get into that here.)

Each time a client connects to a server, it must verify that its cache contents are still valid. (It did not receive any invalidation messages while it was disconnected.) This involves asking the server to replay invalidations it missed. If it’s been disconnected too long, it discards its cache.

Invalidation queue

The ZEO server keeps a queue of recent invalidation messages in memory. When a client connects to the server, it sends the timestamp of the most recent invalidation message it has received. If that message is still in the invalidation queue, then the server sends the client all the missing invalidations.

The default size of the invalidation queue is 100. If the invalidation queue is larger, it will be more likely that a client that reconnects will be able to verify its cache using the queue. On the other hand, a large queue uses more memory on the server to store the message. Invalidation messages tend to be small, perhaps a few hundred bytes each on average; it depends on the number of objects modified by a transaction.

You can also provide an invalidation age when configuring the server. In this case, if the invalidation queue is too small, but a client has been disconnected for a time interval that is less than the invalidation age, then invalidations are replayed by iterating over the lower-level storage on the server. If the age is too high, and clients are disconnected for a long time, then this can put a lot of load on the server.

Transaction timeouts

A ZEO server can be configured to timeout a transaction if it takes too long to complete. Only a single transaction can commit at a time; so if one transaction takes too long, all other clients will be delayed waiting for it. In the extreme, a client can hang during the commit process. If the client hangs, the server will be unable to commit other transactions until it restarts. A well-behaved client will not hang, but the server can be configured with a transaction timeout to guard against bugs that cause a client to hang.

If any transaction exceeds the timeout threshold, the client’s connection to the server will be closed and the transaction aborted. Once the transaction is aborted, the server can start processing other client’s requests. Most transactions should take very little time to commit. The timer begins for a transaction after all the data has been sent to the server. At this point, the cost of commit should be dominated by the cost of writing data to disk; it should be unusual for a commit to take longer than 1 second. A transaction timeout of 30 seconds should tolerate heavy load and slow communications between client and server, while guarding against hung servers.

When a transaction times out, the client can be left in an awkward position. If the timeout occurs during the second phase of the two phase commit, the client will log a panic message. This should only cause problems if the client transaction involved multiple storages. If it did, it is possible that some storages committed the client changes and others did not.

Connection management

A ZEO client manages its connection to the ZEO server. If it loses the connection, it attempts to reconnect. While it is disconnected, it can satisfy some reads by using its cache.

The client can be configured with multiple server addresses. In this case, it assumes that each server has identical content and will use any server that is available. It is possible to configure the client to accept a read-only connection to one of these servers if no read-write connection is available. If it has a read-only connection, it will continue to poll for a read-write connection.

If a single address resolves to multiple IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, the client will connect to an arbitrary of these addresses.

SSL

ZEO supports the use of SSL connections between servers and clients, including certificate authentication. We’re still understanding use cases for this, so details of operation may change.