Locking Mechanisms

Author

Thomas Bonfort

Contact

tbonfort at terriscope.fr

MapCache sometimes needs exclusive access to a given resource, and provides some mechanisms to ensure that no more than one MapCache instance can operate on that resource. This may happen when:

• Sending a request to a source WMS server for a given metatile. Only a single MapCache instance should be sending that request; other MapCache instances processing a tile from that same metatile should wait for that request to finish rather than sending the same exact request again (in order not to overload the WMS server).

• Writing a tile inside a TIFF cache. The TIFF library does not handle concurrent writes, so MapCache must ensure that only a single instance is accessing a given TIFF file for writing.

A locker is configured with:

<locker type="...">
  <timeout>60</timeout>
  <retry>0.1</retry>
  ...
</locker>

When a MapCache instance cannot acquire a lock because it has already been acquired by another instance, it will:

• Check back every <retry> seconds to see if the lock has been released by the other instance.

• Consider that after <timeout> seconds the other instance has failed, and delete the lock before acquiring it itself.

Disk Locks

This locking mechanism places a file somewhere in the filesystem. The filesystem can be a network share in order to synchronize multiple MapCache instances.

<locker type="disk">
  <directory>/path/to/lockdir</directory>
</locker>

The configured directory should be read/write accessible by the MapCache instance.

Memcache Locks

This locking mechanism uses a third-party memcache instance to keep track of the locks.

<locker type="memcache">
   <server>
     <host>localhost</host>
     <port>11211</port>
   </server>
   <server>
     <host>memcache-host</host>
     <port>11212</port>
   </server>
</locker>

Fallback Locks

This “meta” locker will fall back to its second configured locker if the first one fails (typically used with a memcache instance if the memcache instance goes down).

<locker type="fallback"
  <locker type="memcache">
     <server>
       <host>localhost</host>
       <port>11211</port>
     </server>
     <server>
       <host>memcache-host</host>
       <port>11212</port>
     </server>
  </locker>
  <locker type="disk">
    <directory>/path/to/lockdir</directory>
  </locker>
</locker>