[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ and network partitions

Tue Dec 11 11:08:27 GMT 2012

On 11/12/12 10:44, Simon MacMullen wrote:
> On 10/12/12 11:12, Tuure Laurinolli wrote:
> Mnesia now includes "majority" option on tables, which disables
>> updates in minority partitions.
>
> That's something that we're looking at for a future release. I don't
> think we could enable it by default (lots of people have two node
> clusters) but it might be helpful for some people.

One additional complication is that the 'majority' table option was 
introduced in Erlang/OTP R14B03, but rabbit is meant to be running on 
versions as old as R12.

> The question of what the minority partition should do when Mnesia
> refuses to perform updates is unclear. Probably it should just shut down
> altogether.

The state of partitions can diverge even in the absence of mnesia writes 
since not all of Rabbit's state is kept in mnesia. So we would probably 
have to shut down minority partitions regardless of whether they are 
performing mnesia updates.

Matthias.