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Recovering from temporary failures

Temporary failures are handled by retrying. A node persistently logs any outstanding remote-operation requests, such as contents update, random walk, or edge addition. A node retries logged updates upon reboot or after it detects another node's recovery. This recovery logic may sometimes create uni-directional edges or more edges than desired, but it maintains the most important invariant, that the graphs are $m$-connected and that all replicas are reachable in the hierarchical name space.

Pangaea reduces the logging overhead during contents-update flooding, by logging only the ID of the modified file and keeping deltas only in memory. To reduce the memory footprint further, when a node finds out that deltas to an unresponsive node are piling up, the sender discards the deltas and falls back on full-state transfer.



Yasushi Saito 2002-10-08