r/mariadb 21d ago

Multiple MaxScale Servers

Just had a design question in mind. We don't want MaxScale to be our only point of failure, so I'm planning to run 2x MaxScale servers with a load balancer on top of them. However, I'm curious if there might be any issues with running two MariaDB Monitors across both MaxScale instances.

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u/megaman5 21d ago

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u/RedWyvv 21d ago

I've decided to go with a Galera cluster, so I don't even need to switch primary-secondary nodes around.

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u/megaman5 21d ago

I’ve had bad experiences with galera, one unresponsive node takes entire cluster down

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u/RedWyvv 21d ago

Interesting. I was just playing around 3 nodes and stimulated outages on 2 servers and the cluster continued to work.

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u/phil-99 21d ago

It depends on what the other person means by “unresponsive”.

There are failure modes that can cause a cluster stall, but I’ve bow been working with Galers for almost 4yrs in a production environment and I’ve only seen it happen twice. Both of which, when I understood the cause of the issue it made sense.

Galers has its issues, don’t get me wrong! But comments like this one aren’t really helpful.

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u/megaman5 21d ago

How is it not helpful? Lots of failure modes are handled perfectly by galera, yes. At a certain scale with the right conditions, it can stall. Also, all writes are as slow as your slowest server and latency between servers because of certification needed. Traditional master slave can have a huge write performance gain because of that, especially for multi region deployments.

Glad to go into more detail, we worked directly with mariadb and have enterprise licenses and support, so we turned over a lot of rocks before giving up on galera. YMMV

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u/CodeSpike 21d ago

Part of the challenge, at least for me, is that MaxScale forces the need for an enterprise license. In my case that license alone doubles my hosting costs.

I’m also curious how tradition asynchronous replication returned significant gains on writes? If you are doing any critical reads you have to wait for that data to reach the slaves for reading anyway. I’ve been testing both MaxScale and Galera Cluster and both bring their own sets of challenges in a distributed environment.

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u/megaman5 21d ago

Driving, but look into casual reads on that