Several shards may share the same sstable - e.g., when re-starting scylla
with a different number of shards, or when importing sstables from an
external source. Sharing an sstable is fine, but it can result in excessive
disk space use because the shared sstable cannot be deleted until all
the shards using it have finished compacting it. Normally, we have no idea
when the shards will decide to compact these sstables - e.g., with size-
tiered-compaction a large sstable will take a long time until we decide
to compact it. So what this patch does is to initiate compaction of the
shared sstables - on each shard using it - so that a soon as possible after
the restart, we will have the original sstable is split into separate
sstables per shard, and the original sstable can be deleted. If several
sstables are shared, we serialize this compaction process so that each
shard only rewrites one sstable at a time. Regular compactions may happen
in parallel, but they will not not be able to choose any of the shared
sstables because those are already marked as being compacted.
Commit 3f2286d0 increased the need for this patch, because since that
commit, if we don't delete the shared sstable, we also cannot delete
additional sstables which the different shards compacted with it. For one
scylla user, this resulted in so much excessive disk space use, that it
literally filled the whole disk.
After this patch commit 3f2286d0, or the discussion in issue #1318 on how
to improve it, is no longer necessary, because we will never compact a shared
sstable together with any other sstable - as explained above, the shared
sstables are marked as "being compacted" so the regular compactions will
avoid them.
Fixes#1314.
Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@scylladb.com>
Message-Id: <1465406235-15378-1-git-send-email-nyh@scylladb.com>
Reviewed-by: Raphael S. Carvalho <raphaelsc@scylladb.com>
(cherry picked from commit 721f7d1d4f)
0a2d4204bd