QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus

Tennage P, Basescu C, Kokoris Kogias E, Syta E, Jovanovic P, Estrada-Galinanes V, Ford B. 2023. QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus. Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. SOSP: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 281–297.

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Author
Tennage, Pasindu; Basescu, Cristina; Kokoris Kogias, LefterisISTA; Syta, Ewa; Jovanovic, Philipp; Estrada-Galinanes, Vero; Ford, Bryan
Department
Abstract
Leader-based consensus algorithms are fast and efficient under normal conditions, but lack robustness to adverse conditions due to their reliance on timeouts for liveness. We present QuePaxa, the first protocol offering state-of-the-art normal-case efficiency without depending on timeouts. QuePaxa uses a novel randomized asynchronous consensus core to tolerate adverse conditions such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, while a one-round-trip fast path preserves the normal-case efficiency of Multi-Paxos or Raft. By allowing simultaneous proposers without destructive interference, and using short hedging delays instead of conservative timeouts to limit redundant effort, QuePaxa permits rapid recovery after leader failure without risking costly view changes due to false timeouts. By treating leader choice and hedging delay as a multi-armed-bandit optimization, QuePaxa achieves responsiveness to prevalent conditions, and can choose the best leader even if the current one has not failed. Experiments with a prototype confirm that QuePaxa achieves normal-case LAN and WAN performance of 584k and 250k cmd/sec in throughput, respectively, comparable to Multi-Paxos. Under conditions such as DoS attacks, misconfigurations, or slow leaders that severely impact existing protocols, we find that QuePaxa remains live with median latency under 380ms in WAN experiments.
Publishing Year
Date Published
2023-10-01
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Marcos K. Aguilera, Pierluca Borsò, Aleksey Charapko, Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, Derek Leung, Louis-Henri Merino, Shailesh Mishra, Haochen Pan, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Lewis Tseng, and Haoqian Zhang for their helpful feedback on early drafts of this paper.
Page
281-297
Conference
SOSP: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Conference Location
Koblenz, Germany
Conference Date
2023-10-23 – 2023-10-26
IST-REx-ID

Cite this

Tennage P, Basescu C, Kokoris Kogias E, et al. QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus. In: Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Association for Computing Machinery; 2023:281-297. doi:10.1145/3600006.3613150
Tennage, P., Basescu, C., Kokoris Kogias, E., Syta, E., Jovanovic, P., Estrada-Galinanes, V., & Ford, B. (2023). QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus. In Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (pp. 281–297). Koblenz, Germany: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600006.3613150
Tennage, Pasindu, Cristina Basescu, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Ewa Syta, Philipp Jovanovic, Vero Estrada-Galinanes, and Bryan Ford. “QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus.” In Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 281–97. Association for Computing Machinery, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600006.3613150.
P. Tennage et al., “QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus,” in Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Koblenz, Germany, 2023, pp. 281–297.
Tennage P, Basescu C, Kokoris Kogias E, Syta E, Jovanovic P, Estrada-Galinanes V, Ford B. 2023. QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus. Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. SOSP: Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 281–297.
Tennage, Pasindu, et al. “QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus.” Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Association for Computing Machinery, 2023, pp. 281–97, doi:10.1145/3600006.3613150.
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