Min and Max Values for Spread Daemon Timeout

Jim_Knicely

When you know your network or nodes may be unable to respond for a specific amount of time due to network delays or temporary pauses of a VM, you can increase the spread timeout period to longer than this time using the SET_SPREAD_OPTION function (available starting in Vertica 9.2.1-0).

You might be wondering what the minimum and maximum values are for the spread timeout. Although not reported in the documentation, we can easily figure out those values ourselves!

Example:

dbadmin=> SELECT SET_SPREAD_OPTION( 'TokenTimeout', '-1');
ERROR 9000:  Invalid value for option TokenTimeout. Timeout must be 0 (auto) or not less than 8000 msec

dbadmin=> SELECT SET_SPREAD_OPTION( 'TokenTimeout', '1000000000');
ERROR 9010:  Invalid value for option TokenTimeout. Timeout must not exceed 999000 msec

So the minimum value for spread timeout is 8 seconds and the maximum value for spread timeout is 999 seconds.

Note that Vertica issues a warning when setting the spread timeout to a value greater than 1 minute!

dbadmin=> SELECT SET_SPREAD_OPTION( 'TokenTimeout', '99900');
WARNING 9002:  Setting the token timeout greater than 60000 msec may severely decrease cluster responsiveness to node shutdowns and failures
NOTICE 9003:  Spread has been notified about the change
                   SET_SPREAD_OPTION
--------------------------------------------------------
 Spread option 'TokenTimeout' has been set to '99900'.

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Helpful Links:
https://www.vertica.com/docs/9.2.x/HTML/Content/Authoring/UsingVerticaOnAzure/AdjustingSpreadDaemonTimeouts.htm

https://www.vertica.com/docs/9.2.x/HTML/Content/Authoring/SQLReferenceManual/Functions/VerticaFunctions/SET_SPREAD_OPTION.htm

Have fun!