Making Fast Consensus Generally Faster

Abstract

New multi-leader consensus protocols leverage the Generalized Consensus specification to enable low latency, even load balancing, and high parallelism. However, these protocols introduce inherent costs with significant performance impact: they need quorums bigger than the minimum required to solve consensus and need to track dependency relations among proposals. In this paper we present M2PAXOS, an implementation of Generalized Consensus that provides fast decisions (i.e., delivery of a command in two communication delays) by leveraging quorums composed of a majority of nodes and by exploiting workload locality. M2PAXOS does not establish command dependencies based on conflicts, instead mapping nodes to accessed objects and enforcing that commands accessing the same objects be ordered by the same node. Our experimental evaluation confirms the effectiveness of M2PAXOS, gaining up to 7X over state-of-the-art Consensus and Generalized Consensus algorithms under partitioned data accesses and up to 5.5× using the TPC-C workload.