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Just curious, how familiar are you with Paxos? I'm asking because failure detection is pretty much isomorphic with distributed consensus and generally considered hard. Ie. how do you differentiate between down and slow?
Extremely familiar - see my articles at http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?p=173 and http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/?p=190 for some tutorials I wrote on the subject. You're correct that failure detection and consensus are very deeply related, in that a strong failure detector is 'sufficient' for consensus. But my point is about client failure detection, not failure detection between servers (which must have some kind…
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