We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Dissecting the Performance of Strongly-Consistent Replication Protocols

Formal Metadata

Title
Dissecting the Performance of Strongly-Consistent Replication Protocols
Title of Series
Number of Parts
155
Author
License
CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Many distributed databases employ consensus protocols to ensure that data is replicated in a strongly-consistent manner on multiple machines despite failures and concurrency. Unfortunately, these protocols show widely varying performance under different network, workload, and deployment conditions, and no previous study offers a comprehensive dissection and comparison of their performance. To fill this gap, we study single-leader, multi-leader, hierarchical multi-leader, and leaderless (opportunistic leader) consensus protocols, and present a comprehensive evaluation of their performance in local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). We take a two-pronged systematic approach. We present an analytic modeling of the protocols using queuing theory and show simulations under varying controlled parameters. To cross-validate the analytic model, we also present empirical results from our prototyping and evaluation framework, Paxi. We distill our findings to simple throughput and latency formulas over the most significant parameters. These formulas enable the developers to decide which category of protocols would be most suitable under given deployment conditions.