

Raft Refloated: Do We Have Consensus? [pdf] - mrry
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ms705/pub/papers/2015-osr-raft.pdf

======
kuujo
The proposed optimizations are pretty interesting, but I think my favorite
such optimization has been proposed by Ayende Rahien. As with the
optimizations outlined in this paper, his is related to leader election.

One of the issues with leader election in Raft is the potential for split
votes. Raft tries I guard against this by randomizing election timeouts in
order to discourage two candidates from requesting votes at the same time.
What Ayende suggests, though, is to add a pre-vote stage wherein followers
poll other nodes to determine whether they can even win an election prior to
actually transitioning to candidates and starting a new election. This ensures
that only up-to-date followers ever become candidates and thus prevents nodes
that will never win an election from ever transitioning to candidates in the
first place.

------
SEJeff
I wonder if the consul or etcd teams will consider adding this into their
respective raft implementations (assuming it does actually improve things as
the paper alludes to).

------
endergen
Has anyone seen their JS visualizer or tool source?

~~~
avsm
We're still cleaning that up for a proper release. It's based on js_of_ocaml
and d3.js, but we're now porting it to use Irmin as its persistence model so
that we can rewind the simulator to arbitrary points in the traces.

