Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication

  • Authors:
  • David R. Cheriton;Dale Skeen

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Dept., Stanford University;Teknekron Software Systems, Inc., Palo Alto, California

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '93 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

Causally and totally ordered communication support (CATOCS) has been proposed as important to provide as part of the basic building blocks for constructing reliable distributed systems. In this paper, we identify four major limitations to CATOCS, investigate the applicability of CATOCS to several classes of distributed applications in light of these limitations, and the potential impact of these facilities on communication scalability and robustness. From this investigation, we find limited merit and several potential problems in using CATOCS. The fundamental difficulty with the CATOCS is that it attempts to solve problems at the communication level in violation of the well-known "end-to-end" argument.