JGroups 2.10 final released

I'm happy to announce that JGroups 2.10 final has been released. It can be downloaded from SourceForge and contains the following major new features (for a detailed list of the 80+ issues  check 2.10 in JIRA):

SCOPE: concurrent delivery of messages from the same sender
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-822]

By default, messages from a sender P are delivered in the (FIFO) order in which P sent them (ignoring OOB messages for now). However, sometimes it would be beneficial to deliver unrelated messages concurrently, e.g. modifications sent by P for different HTTP sessions.

SCOPE is a new protocol, which allows a developer to define a scope for a message, and that scope is then used to deliver messages from P concurrently.

See http://www.jgroups.org/manual/html/user-advanced.html#Scopes for details.


Use of factory to create sockets
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-278]

There's now a method Protocol.setSocketFactory(SocketFactory) which allows to set a socket factory, used to create and close datagram and TCP (client and server) sockets. The default implementation keeps track of open sockets, so
./probe.sh socks
dumps a list of open sockets.


UNICAST2: experimental version of UNICAST based on negative acks
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1140]

By not sending acks for received messages, we can cut down on the number of acks. UNICAST2 is ca 20-30% faster than UNICAST as a result. Needs more testing though, currently UNICAST2 is experimental.


Certain IPv4 addresses should be allowed in an IPv6 stack
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1152]

They will be converted into IPv6 mapped IPv4 addresses. This relaxes the (too restrictive) IP address conformance testing somewhat, and allows for more configurations to actually start the stack and not fail with an exception.


Multiple components using the same channel
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1177]

This is a new light weight version of the (old and dreaded !) Multiplexer, which allows for sharing of channels between components, such as for example HAPartition and Infinispan.

*** Only to be used by experts ! ***


MERGE2: fast merge
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1191]

Fast merge in case where we receive messages from a member which is not part of our group, but has the same group name.


RpcDispatcher / MessageDispatcher: add exclusion list
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1192]

If an RPC needs to be sent to all nodes in a cluster except one node (e.g. the sender itself), then we can simply exclude the sender. This is done using
RequestOptions.setExclusionList(Address ...  xcluded_mbrs).
This is simpler than having to create the full list, and remove the sender.


Ability to use keywords instead of IP addresses
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1204]

Whenever IP addresses (symbolic or dotted-decimal notation) are used, we can now use a keyword instead. Currently, the keywords are "GLOBAL" (public IP address), "SITE_LOCAL" (private IP address), "LINK_LOCAL" (link local), "LOOPBACK" (a loopback address) and "NON_LOOPBACK" (any but a loopback address).
This is useful in cloud environments where IP address may not be known beforehand.
Example: java -Djgroups.bind_addr=SITE_LOCAL
Example:



GossipRouter: re-introduce pinging to detect crashed clients
[https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-1213]

When clients are terminated without closing of sockets (e.g. in virtualized environments), they'd cause their
entries to not be removed in GossipRouter. This was changed by (re-)introducing pinging.







Feeback is appreciated via the usual channels (mailing list, IRC) !
Enjoy !

Bela Ban
Vladimir Blagojevic
Richard Achmatowicz

mod-cluster webinar: video available on vimeo

On July 7th, I did a webinar on mod-cluster, and it was a huge success: 1215 people signed up and 544 attended the webinar ! I'm told that this is the second highest turnout ever for Red Hat (the highest being an xvirt webinar a couple of years ago, with 600 attendees)...

For those who missed the webex presentation, here's the link to the recorded video. For those who only want to see the demo, it is here.

The demo is really cool: I set up a huge cluster in the cloud, spanning GoGrid, EC2 and Rackspace as clouds, and fronting a JBoss 6 based cluster with mod-cluster.

I showed how cluster nodes dynamically register themselves with httpd, or de-register when shutting down, and how web applications get registered/de-registered.

For those who know mod-jk: no more workers.properties or uriworkmap.properties are needed !

The coolest part was where I ran a load test, simulating 80 clients, each creating and destroying a session every 30 seconds: initially I ran 2 cluster nodes on EC2, so every node had 40 sessions on average. Then I started another EC2 instance, a GoGrid instance and 2 Rackspace instances, and after a few minutes, there were 3 mod-cluster domains with 3, 1 and 2 servers respectively, and every server had ca 12 sessions on average !

This can be compared to a bookshop, which spins up additional servers in the cloud around the holidays to serve increased traffic, and where the servers form a cluster for redundancy (don't want to lose your shoppig cart !).

Enjoy the demo, and give us feedback on mod-cluster on the mailing list or forum.

Bela