Keeping the mutations coming from the streaming process as mutations like any
other have a number of advantages - and that's why we do it.
However, this makes it impossible for Seastar's I/O scheduler to differentiate
between incoming requests from clients, and those who are arriving from peers
in the streaming process.
As a result, if the streaming mutations consume a significant fraction of the
total mutations, and we happen to be using the disk at its limits, we are in no
position to provide any guarantees - defeating the whole purpose of the
scheduler.
To implement that, we'll keep a separate set of memtables that will contain
only streaming mutations. We don't have to do it this way, but doing so
makes life a lot easier. In particular, to write an SSTable, our API requires
(because the filter requires), that a good estimate on the number of partitions
is informed in advance. The partitions also need to be sorted.
We could write mutations directly to disk, but the above conditions couldn't be
met without significant effort. In particular, because mutations can be
arriving from multiple peer nodes, we can't really sort them without keeping a
staging area anyway.
Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glauber@scylladb.com>
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