Trade-offs in implementing causal message logging protocols

Abstract

Casual message logging protocols [3] have several attractive properties: they introduce no blocking, send no additional messages over those sent by the application, and can never cause orphans to be created by crashes. Causal message logging, however, does require additional data to be piggybacked on application messages. The amount of such piggybacked data can become large. In this paper, we present five different implementations of casual message logging. All of the corresponding protocols are parameterized by f, the maximum number of processes that can fail concurrently. We also explore how the application's communication structure can be exploited to limit the amount of piggybacked data.