I've read Lamport's paper on Paxos. I've also heard that it isn't used much in practice, for reasons of performance. What algorithms are commonly used for consensus in distributed systems?
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208answers:
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+2
A:
Not sure if this is helpful (since this is not from actual production information), but in our "distributed systems" course we've studied, along with Paxos, the Chandra-Toueg and Mostefaoui-Raynal algorithms (of the latter our professor was especially fond).
Oak
2010-01-04 19:46:41
+1 Thanks, those are some good pointers.
Rob Lachlan
2010-01-04 19:56:02
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A:
If performance is an issue, consider whether you need all of the strong consistency guarantees Paxos gives you. See e.g. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1466448 and http://incubator.apache.org/cassandra/. Searching on Paxos optimised gets me hits, but I suspect that relaxing some of the requirements will buy you more than tuning the protocol.
mcdowella
2010-01-04 19:57:19
I'm aware of the whole BASE approach, but there are situations which require ACID guarantees, and for those situation we need something like Paxos. But you're right, strict consistency isn't right for everything.
Rob Lachlan
2010-01-04 20:06:10