Replicating Locking Sessions

We were running Drupal benchmarks to measure the performance of Drupal/Galera cluster and were surprised to find locking sessions (LOCK TABLES...UNLOCK) in the SQL profile. Locking sessions were originally left out of Galera supported feature set, but now we need to re-consider our policy a bit. Apparently, we are going to encounter more applications, which were originally written for MYISAM usage, but were later migrated to INNODB. As a rule of thumb, it seems that if application can be configured to both MyISAM and INNODB usage, it quite probably uses locking sessions as well.

Eager Replication
We have in the past, implemented one pretty effective method for replicating locking sessions in synchronous cluster. This, "eager replication" method, used transaction sequencing from group communication level to order the table locks. However, the implementation required eventually complete re-write of thr locking (thr_lock.c) and this effort was sure not a joy ride. thr_lock.c module contains adult only content.

We are now looking for a more light weight way to support locking sessions, instead. Galera is a replication system for transaction processing applications and anything we implement beyond that will be a hack (or add-on feature, to translate it to sales-talk). Locking sessions require up-front locking of resources and that makes them complicated to synchronize.

Managing Read Locks
First observation is that read and write locks can be treated differently in Galera cluster. Read locks do not replicate anything, because they are pure read only sessions by definition. Therefore we can leave them processing un-interrupted in local state. Slave applier must acknowledge read locking sessions and wait for them to complete. If application has lengthy read locking sessions, it will obviously delay cluster processing. But that is more or less application's problem, and it could be helped with a bit of re-design in application side.

Converting Locking Sessions to Transactions
Transactions and locking sessions have different semantics, but some applications might, nevertheless, work well with (write) locking sessions replaced by transactions. We can implement this quite simply in parsing level and no application changes are needed for this. For the application, this change in processing, means that "locking sessions" could be aborted due to deadlocks. If deadlocks will happen with application's work load and there is no comprehensive exception management in the application code, then this approach is not viable anymore.

We will add new MySQL option variable for defining if (write) locking sessions should be converted to transactions, and try how Drupal benchmarks works with this method.
Un-interrupted read locks and optional write lock session to transaction conversion will be the first attempts in supporting locking sessions. Hopefully, we don't need to go any further in this path. Otherwise, we are quite close to eager replication model again.