milvus/docs/design_docs/milvus_timesync_en.md

Timesync -- All The things you should know

Time Synchronization is the kernel part of Milvus 2.0; it affects all components of the system. This document describes the detailed design of Time Synchronization.

There are 2 kinds of events in Milvus 2.0:

• DDL events
  • create collection
  • drop collection
  • create partition
  • drop partition
• DML events
  • insert
  • search
  • etc

All events have a Timestamp to indicate when this event occurs.

Suppose there are two users, u1 and u2. They connect to Milvus and do the following operations at the respective timestamps.

ts	u1	u2
t0	create Collection C0	-
t2	-	search on C0
t5	insert A1 into C0	-
t7	-	search on C0
t10	insert A2	-
t12	-	search on C0
t15	delete A1 from C0	-
t17	-	search on C0

Ideally, u2 expects C0 to be empty at t2, and could only see A1 at t7; while u2 could see both A1 and A2 at t12, but only see A2 at t17.

It's easy to achieve this in a single-node database. But for a Distributed System, such as Milvus, it's a little difficult; the following problems need to be solved:

1. If u1 and u2 are on different nodes, and their time clock is not synchronized. To give an extreme example, suppose that the time of u2 is 24 hours later than u1, then all the operations of u1 can't be seen by u2 until next day.
2. Network latency. If u2 starts the Search on C0 at t17, then how can it be guaranteed that all the events before t17 have been processed? If the events of delete A1 from C0 has been delayed due to the network latency, then it would lead to incorrect state: u2 would see both A1 and A2 at t17.

Time synchronization system is used to solve the above problems.

Timestamp Oracle(TSO)

Like TiKV, Milvus 2.0 provides TSO service. All the events must alloc timestamp from TSO，not from local clock, so the first problem can be solved.

TSO is provided by the RootCoord component. Clients could alloc one or more timestamp in a single request; the proto is defined as following.

service RootCoord {
    ...
    rpc AllocTimestamp(AllocTimestampRequest) returns (AllocTimestampResponse) {}
    ...
}

message AllocTimestampRequest {
  common.MsgBase base = 1;
  uint32 count = 3;
}

message AllocTimestampResponse {
    common.Status status = 1;
    uint64 timestamp = 2;
    uint32 count = 3;
}

Timestamp is of type uint64, containing physical and logical parts.

This is the format of Timestamp

In an AllocTimestamp request, if AllocTimestampRequest.count is greater than 1, AllocTimestampResponse.timestamp indicates the first available timestamp in the response.

Time Synchronization

To understand the Time Synchronization better, let's introduce the data operation of Milvus 2.0 briefly. Taking Insert Operation as an example.

• User can configure lots of Proxy to achieve load balancing, in Milvus 2.0
• User can use SDK to connect to any Proxy
• When Proxy receives Insert Request from SDK, it splits InsertMsg into different MsgStream according to the hash value of Primary Key
• Each InsertMsg would be assigned with a Timestamp before sending to the MsgStream

Note: MsgStream is the wrapper of message queue, the default message queue in Milvus 2.0 is pulsar

Based on the above information, we know that the MsgStream has the following characteristics:

• In MsgStream, InsertMsg from the same Proxy must be incremented in timestamp
• In MsgStream, InsertMsg from different Proxy have no relationship in timestamp

The following figure shows an example of InsertMsg in MsgStream. The snippet contains 5 InsertMsg, 3 of them from Proxy1 and others from Proxy2.

The 3 InsertMsg from Proxy1 are incremented in timestamp, and the 2 InsertMsg from Proxy2 are also incremented in timestamps, but there is no relationship between Proxy1 and Proxy2.

So the second problem has turned into this: after reading a message from MsgStream, how to make sure that all the messages with smaller timestamp have been consumed?

For example, when reading a message with timestamp 110 produced by Proxy2, but the message with timestamp 80 produced by Proxy1, is still in the MsgStream. How can this situation be handled?

The following graph shows the core logic of Time Synchronization System in Milvus 2.0; it should solve the second problem.

• Each Proxy will periodically report its latest timestamp of every MsgStream to RootCoord; the default interval is 200ms
• For each Msgstream, Rootcoord finds the minimum timestamp of all Proxy on this Msgstream, and inserts this minimum timestamp into the Msgstream
• When the consumer reads the timestamp inserted by the RootCoord on the MsgStream, it indicates that all messages with smaller timestamp have been consumed, so all actions that depend on this timestamp can be executed safely
• The message inserted by RootCoord into MsgStream is of type TimeTick

This is the Proto that is used by Proxy to report timestamp to RootCoord:

service RootCoord {
    ...
    rpc UpdateChannelTimeTick(internal.ChannelTimeTickMsg) returns (common.Status) {}
    ... 
}

message ChannelTimeTickMsg {
  common.MsgBase base = 1;
  repeated string channelNames = 2;
  repeated uint64 timestamps = 3;
  uint64 default_timestamp = 4;
}

After inserting Timetick, the Msgstream should look like this:

MsgStream will process the messages in batches according to TimeTick, and ensure that the output messages meet the requirements of timestamp. For more details, please refer to the MsgStream design details.