High Throughput Total Order Broadcast for Cluster Environments

Total order broadcast is a fundamental communication primitive that plays a central role in bringing cheap software-based high availability to a wide array of services. This paper studies the practical performance of such a primitive on a cluster of homogeneous machines. We present FSR, a (uniform) total order broadcast protocol that provides high throughput, regardless of message broadcast patterns. FSR is based on a ring topology, only relies on point-to-point inter-process communication, and has a linear latency with respect to the total number of processes in the system. Moreover, it is fair in the sense that each process has an equal opportunity of having its messages delivered by all processes. On a cluster of Itanium based machines, FSR achieves a throughput of 79 Mbit/s on a 100 Mbit/s switched Ethernet network.