In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB, we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has uncovered a subtle error in Rethink’s cluster membership system. This error can lead to stale reads, dirty reads, lost updates, node crashes, and table unavailability requiring an unsafe emergency repair. Versions 2.2.4 and 2.1.6, released last week, address this issue.

Until now, Jepsen tests have used a stable cluster membership throughout the test. We typically run the system being tested on five nodes, and although the network topology between the nodes may change, processes may crash and restart, and the system may elect new nodes as leaders, we do not introduce or remove nodes from the system while it is running. Thus far, we haven’t had to go that far to uncover concurrency errors.

Since RethinkDB passed its stable-membership partitioning tests, I offered the team a more aggressive failure model: we’d dynamically reconfigure the cluster membership during the test. This is a harder problem than consensus with fixed membership: both old and new nodes must gracefully agree on the membership change, ensure that both sets of nodes will agree on any operations performed during the handover, and finally transition to normal consensus on the new set of nodes. The delicate handoff of operations from old nodes to new provides ample opportunities for mistakes.

In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy.

RethinkDB is an open-source, horizontally scalable document store. Similar to MongoDB, documents are hierarchical, dynamically typed, schemaless objects. Each document is uniquely identified by an id key within a table, which in turn is scoped to a DB. On top of this key-value structure, a composable query language allows users to operate on data within documents, or across multiple documents–performing joins, aggregations, etc. However, only operations on a single document are atomic–queries which access multiple keys may read and write inconsistent data.

RethinkDB shards data across nodes by primary key, maintaining replicas of each key across n nodes for redundancy. For each shard, a single replica is designated a primary, which serializes all updates (and strong reads) to that shard’s documents–allowing linearizable writes, updates, and reads against a single key.