[erlang-questions] Can one mnesia table fragment be further fragmented?

[Paul Mineiro]

Re: picking what gets split, not with the default frag_hash.  You can see
what it's doing in mnesia_frag_hash.erl ... it basically splits the
fragments in order.  This means that unless there is a power-of-two number
of fragments they will be of different magnitudes.  You could leverage
that for your load balancing by placing bigger fragments on less noded
nodes, etc.  In fact, maybe this is why you are seeing
an uneven distribution to begin with?

-- p

p.z. If you are feeling your wheaties, you can make your own frag hash,
and specify the module in the frag_properties when you create the table.

http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/Mnesia_chap5.html#5.3

Don't be tempted to just use phash2 or something like that; in order to go
from N fragments to M fragments you have to pass through all the
intermediate stages N + 1, ..., M - 1, M ; you do not want to rehash all
the data in all the buckets at each step.

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, devdoer bird wrote:

> Thanks.
>
> Thant means ,I need fragment table many times not for load balance but for
> decreasing one specific node's (the node is not as powerful as others )
> load.
>
> Eg. Node A has 2 fragments,Node B has 2 fragments. Each fragment has equal
> records(say 100 records each fragment).
>
> Now the Node B is heavily loaded.If I adding one or two   fragments in Node
> A , the load of Node B won't be
>
> decreased ,for the records from Node A will be splited and moved to the new
> fragments,the records on Node A is 50+50+50+50=200 ,the total number of
> Node B's record  is still 200.
>
> In order to decreas the load on Node B,I have to calcaulate carefully how
> many new fragments should be added.
>
> If there's a way for mnesia to specify which node's fragment should be
> splited when addin a new fragment,the problems above will be solved.Take the
> example above ,when  adding a new fragment,I can tell mnesia to split Node
> B's fragment.
>
> 2008/6/19, Scott Lystig Fritchie <fritchie@REDACTED>:
> >
> > devdoer bird <devdoer2@REDACTED> wrote:
> >
> > dd> I spilit one mnesia table into 3 fragments which distributed on 3
> > dd> machines named A,B and C,but now the the machine "A" is very busy,
> >
> > dd> so I decide split the fragment on the machine "A" into small
> > dd> fragments.Does mnesia support this?
> >
> > No, that isn't possible with Mnesia, not as you wish/state above.
> >
> > If you have a table 'tab' split into fragments 'tab', 'tab_frag2', and
> > 'tab_frag3', you can add more fragments: 'tab_frag4', 'tab_frag5', etc.
> > You can choose to put only 1 fragment on node A, 4 fragments on node B,
> > and 4 fragments on node C.  Assuming that access to the table is evenly
> > distributed over all fragments, then node A should be getting only 1/9
> > of the load, and B & C will get 4/9 of the load.
> >
> > -Scott
> >
>

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

        -- Paul Graham