Heartbeat for Cluster Connectivity

Communication between cluster nodes for cluster connectivity is critical for smooth cluster operations. Therefore, NCache provides Heart Beat for the clusters to detect connection breakage with any node of the cluster. Connection breakage may occur due to an unplugged network cable or disabling of a network connection. When this option is enabled, a node of a cluster sends some dummy packets to other nodes and waits for acknowledgment. Therefore, if live nodes do not receive acknowledgments from any idle node after a specific duration, they will consider it dead and will update their views by excluding it from the cluster.

There will be no overhead of heartbeat messages when all nodes are active and sending messages to each other.

Enabling Heartbeat for Cluster Connectivity Using the NCache Management Center

  • Launch the NCache Management Center by browsing to http://localhost:8251 or <server-ip>:8251 on Windows and Linux.

  • In the left navigation bar, click on Clustered Caches or Local Caches, based on the cache to configure.

  • Against the cache name, click on View Details.

View Details Heartbeat

  • This opens the detailed configuration page for the cache. Go to the Advanced Settings tab and click on Cluster Settings in the left bar.

  • Check the Use Heart Beat checkbox to enable heartbeat.

Use Heartbeat

  • Click on Save Changes to apply this configuration to the cache.

Manually Editing NCache Configuration

Important

Ensure the cache is stopped before making any configuration changes.

  • Enable/disable Heartbeat through the config.ncconf file by specifying the use-heart-beat key in the <cluster-settings> tag:
 <cache-settings ...>
   <cache-topology topology="partitioned">
     <cluster-settings operation-timeout="60sec" stats-repl-interval="1sec" use-heart-beat="True">
      ...
     </cluster-settings>
   </cache-topology>
</cache-settings>
  • Once the changes are made, start the cache and restart the NCache service.

See Also

Communication Reliability
Bind Cluster and Client/Server IP with Multiple NICs
Auto Start Cache on Boot
Nagle's Algorithm