Fast Failure Detection in a Process Group

Failure detectors represent a very important building block in distributed applications. The speed and the accuracy of the failure detectors is critical to the performance of the applications built on them. In a common implementation of failure detector based on heartbeats, there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy so it is difficult to be both fast and accurate. Based on the observation that in many distributed applications, one process takes a special role as the leader, we propose a Fast Failure Detection (FFD) algorithm that detects the failure of the leader both fast and accurately. Taking advantage of spatial multiple timeouts, FFD detects the failure of the leader within a time period of just a little more than one heartbeat interval, making it almost the fastest detection algorithm possible based on heartbeat messages. FFD could be used stand alone in a static configuration where the leader process is fixed at one site. In a dynamic setting, where the role of leader ha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Xinjie Li, Monica Brockmeyer
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Failure Detector, Fast Failure Detection, Important Building Block, IPPS 2007