gistfile1.txt

BACKGROUND
============
A recurring problem for ZooKeeper users is garbage collection of parent nodes. Many recipes 
(e.g. locks, leaders, etc.) call for the creation of a parent node under which participants 
create sequential nodes. When the participant is done, it deletes its node. In practice, the 
ZooKeeper tree begins to fill up with orphaned parent nodes that are no longer needed. The 
ZooKeeper APIs don’t provide a way to clean these. Over time, ZooKeeper can become unstable 
due to the number of these nodes.

CURRENT SOLUTIONS
===================
Apache Curator has a workaround solution for this by providing the Reaper class which runs 
in the background looking for orphaned parent nodes and deleting them. This isn’t ideal and 
it would be better if ZooKeeper supported this directly.

PROPOSAL
=========
ZOOKEEPER-723 and ZOOKEEPER-834 have been proposed to allow EPHEMERAL nodes to contain 
child nodes. This is not optimum as EPHEMERALs are tied to a session and the general 
use case of parent nodes is for PERSISTENT nodes. This proposal adds a new node type, 
CONTAINER. A CONTAINER node is the same as a PERSISTENT node with the additional property 
that when its last child is deleted, it is deleted (and CONTAINER nodes recursively up 
the tree are deleted if empty).

I have a first pass (untested) straw man proposal open for comment here:

https://github.com/apache/zookeeper/pull/28

In order to have minimum impact on existing implementations, a container node is denoted 
by having an ephemeralOwner id of Long.MIN_VALUE. This is pretty hackish, but I think it’s 
the most supportable without causing disruption. Also, a container behaves a “little bit” 
like an EPHEMERAL node so it isn’t totally illogical. Alternatively, a new field could be 
added to STAT.

I look forward to feedback on this. If people think it’s worthwhile I’ll open a Jira and 
work on a Production quality solution. If it’s rejected, I’d appreciate discussion of an 
alternate as this is a real need in the ZK user community.

-Jordan