Manticore Search is a highly distributed system that provides all the necessary components to create a highly available and scalable database for search. This includes:

• distributed table for sharding
  • Mirroring for high availability
  • Load balancing for scalability
• Replication for data safety

Manticore Search offers great flexibility in terms of how you set up your cluster. There are no limitations, so it's up to you to design your cluster according to your needs. Simply learn about the tools mentioned above and use them to achieve your desired goal.

To add a new node to a cluster, simply start another instance of Manticore and ensure that it is accessible by the other nodes in the cluster. Connect the new node to the rest of the cluster using a distributed table and ensure data safety with replication.

To understand how to add a distributed table with remote agents, it is important to first have a basic understanding of distributed tables In this article, we will focus on how to use a distributed table as the basis for creating a cluster of Manticore instances.

table mydist {
          type  = distributed
          agent = box1:9312:shard1
          agent = box2:9312:shard2
          agent = box3:9312:shard3
          agent = box4:9312:shard4
}

In the event of a server failure, the distributed table will still work, but the results from the failed shard will be missing.

table mydist {
          type  = distributed
          agent = box1:9312|box5:9312:shard1
          agent = box2:9312:|box6:9312:shard2
          agent = box3:9312:|box7:9312:shard3
          agent = box4:9312:|box8:9312:shard4
}

Agent mirrors can be used interchangeably when processing a search query. The Manticore instance(s) hosting the distributed table where the mirrored agents are defined keeps track of mirror status (alive or dead) and response times, and performs automatic failover and load balancing based on this information.

agent = node1|node2|node3:9312:shard2

The above example declares that node1:9312, node2:9312, and node3:9312 all have a table called shard2, and can be used as interchangeable mirrors. If any of these servers go down, the queries will be distributed between the remaining two. When the server comes back online, the master will detect it and begin routing queries to all three nodes again.

A mirror may also include an individual table list, as follows:

agent = node1:9312:node1shard2|node2:9312:node2shard2

This works similarly to the previous example, but different table names will be used when querying different servers. For example, node1shard2 will be used when querying node1:9312, and node2shard will be used when querying node2:9312.

By default, all queries are routed to the best of the mirrors. The best mirror is selected based on recent statistics, as controlled by the ha_period_karma config directive. The master stores metrics (total query count, error count, response time, etc.) for each agent and groups these by time spans. The karma is the length of the time span. The best agent mirror is then determined dynamically based on the last two such time spans. The specific algorithm used to pick a mirror can be configured with the ha_strategy directive.

The karma period is in seconds and defaults to 60 seconds. The master stores up to 15 karma spans with per-agent statistics for instrumentation purposes (see SHOW AGENT STATUS statement). However, only the last two spans out of these are used for HA/LB logic.

When there are no queries, the master sends a regular ping command every ha_ping_interval milliseconds in order to collect statistics and check if the remote host is still alive. The ha_ping_interval defaults to 1000 msec. Setting it to 0 disables pings, and statistics will only be accumulated based on actual queries.

Example:

# sharding table over 4 servers total
# in just 2 shards but with 2 failover mirrors for each shard
# node1, node2 carry shard1 as local
# node3, node4 carry shard2 as local

# config on node1, node2
agent = node3:9312|node4:9312:shard2

# config on node3, node4
agent = node1:9312|node2:9312:shard1