The cost of recovery in message logging protocols

Abstract

Past research in message logging has focused on studying the relative overhead imposed by pessimistic, optimistic and causal protocols during failure-free executions. In this paper, we give the first experimental evaluation of the performance of these protocols during recovery. Our results suggest that applications face a complex tradeoff when choosing a message logging protocol for fault tolerance. On the one hand, optimistic protocols can provide fast failure-free execution and good performance during recovery, but are complex to implement and can create orphan processes. On the other hand, orphan-free protocols either risk being slow during recovery (e.g. sender-based pessimistic and causal protocols) or incur a substantial overhead during failure-free execution (e.g. receiver-based pessimistic protocols). To address this tradeoff, we propose hybrid logging protocols, which are a new class of orphan-free protocols. We show that hybrid protocols perform within 2% of causal logging during failure-free execution and within 2% of receiver-based logging during recovery.