On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Ryan Steele wrote:
I actually realized that my logic was slightly faulty - since each of the six masters is capable of performing the write operation, the referral will never be chased. Given that, is it impossible to have an N-Way MultiMaster configuration in which writes are possible on any node, but the writes at any given time are performed on only one of them to ensure consistency? That is, short of doing what I'm doing now (sending ALL traffic to only one master), which doesn't scale very well.
Have you considered mirrormode (possibly combined with some back-ldap on the consumers so that you can present as only one always-able-to-write IP)?
With N-way multimaster you lose write performance as you add additional servers, as the write needs to be committed across an increasing N. More commits means more complexity means less performance. mirrormode keeps N=1, for good write performance, while still allowing for redundancy.