Throughput optimal total order broadcast for cluster environments

Abstract

Total order broadcast is a fundamental communication primitive that plays a central role in bringing cheap software-based high availability to a wide range of services. This article studies the practical performance of such a primitive on a cluster of homogeneous machines. We present LCR, the first throughput optimal uniform total order broadcast protocol. LCR is based on a ring topology. It only relies on point-to-point inter-process communication and has a linear latency with respect to the number of processes. LCR is also fair in the sense that each process has an equal opportunity of having its messages delivered by all processes. We benchmark a C implementation of LCR against Spread and JGroups, two of the most widely used group communication packages. LCR provides higher throughput than the alternatives, over a large number of scenarios.