30 Nov
2017
30 Nov
'17
3:21 p.m.
Hi Marc,
Here are some answers:
1) MD5 was already a dependency of our oldcore and using SHA1 would have added a
dependency without bringing much benefit. Since we only used 64 bits of the MD5 anyway, I
doubt using SHA1 would have provided a better distribution.
2) Such a collision detection is difficult to be introduced in the existing code base, for
some API it is even impossible. What you experience with the 32-bit ids had been my
motivation to the changes in 4.x and I could say, based on my long XWiki experience, that
even with the poor 32 bit ids, very few users had been affected. Therefore, by improving
the hash algorithm, the size of the ids, and the quality of the hashed key, we have
considered ourselves to be saved enough for a normal usage.
3) That’s the worst point. I cannot answer about the first decision, I wasn’t yet involve,
but regarding the changes introduced in 4.0, a change had been considered. The ids are
only there to satisfy Hibernate and its loading mechanism. If we had used a counter, we
had to manage a conversion table between ids and entity references with all the additional
complexity (consistency issues, caching, ...). This is so because we use entity reference
to point directly to document (or even objects) everywhere in XWiki. This would have been
a huge work to introduce that behaviour and at the same time keeping all the existing API
unchanged. It would probably have introduced a performance penalty as well. This is why we
resigned and go for an improved hash solution. IMO, if we had to make such a change, we
are even better rewriting the storage service completely, and even stop using Hibernate,
which, to be honest, does not bring much benefit to XWiki with its ORM aspects.
But if you really want the complete answers, you can look at those threads:
http://xwiki.markmail.org/thread/fuprtrnupz2uy37f
http://xwiki.markmail.org/thread/fsd25bvft74xwgcx
Regards,
--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
On 30 Nov 2017, 14:14 +0100, Marc Sladek <marc.sladek(a)synventis.com>om>, wrote:
Dear XWiki devs
We are using the XWiki platform for our applications but sadly are still
stuck with 2.7.2. Lately we ran into issues on a large database and noticed
"disappearing" BaseObjects. We were able to link it to XWIKI-6990
<http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-6990>, where hibernate IDs collided
(hash collisions) and overwrote other objects without any trace - neither
visible in the history nor in a log file.
We analysed your implemented solution from 4.0+ in XWikiDocument
<https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/blob/stable-8.4.x/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-oldcore/src/main/java/com/xpn/xwiki/doc/XWikiDocument.java#L841
and BaseElement
<https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/blob/stable-8.4.x/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-oldcore/src/main/java/com/xpn/xwiki/objects/BaseElement.java#L237
and
noticed that you changed the 32bit String#hashCode to 64bit MD5, which
makes a collision less likely. I have a few questions regarding your
solution:
1) Is there any specific reason why you have chosen MD5 over SHA-1 or 2?
2) Collisions are still possible and would be extremely hard to notice
since they are completely silent. Have you considered to implement a
collision detection to at least log occurring collisions - or even better
reserve 1-2bits of the 64bit to be used as collision counter in the case of
it happening?
3) To question the concept of generating a hash for an ID in general:
Wouldn't a database defined "auto increment" be a much more robust
solution
for the hibernate IDs? A collision would be impossible and
clustering/scalability is still possible with e.g. the InnoDB “interleaved”
autoincrement lock mode. Why have you chosen a hash based solution in the
first place?
I'm sorry if these questions were already answered in the dev mailing list
or on issues, please link me to them since I couldn't find any concrete
answers.
Thanks for your time and regards
Marc Sladek
synventis gmbh