SETH: a quorum-based database system for experimentation with failures

Abstract

The behavior and performance of replica control protocols (RCP) that deal with network partitions is investigated using a quorum-based replicated database system called Seth. Seth is designed to be used as a transaction processing system, as well as a flexible experimentation tool. Seth's experimentation domain includes failures (site/link failure/repair rates), transactions (arrival rate, size, type, read/write ratio), quorum assignment, communications (communication protocols, network type, topology, number of sites), and transaction protocols (quorum-based RCPs, distributed commitment, concurrency control). The design and implementation of Seth are discussed, and two experiments are presented. The first studies the behavior of the quorum consensus protocol against different transition loads. The second experiment shows how expensive quorum-based replication is in terms of network traffic.<>