Leases: an efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency

  • Authors:
  • C. Gray;D. Cheriton

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Department, Stanford University;Computer Science Department, Stanford University

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '89 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Caching introduces the overhead and complexity of ensuring consistency, reducing some of its performance benefits. In a distributed system, caching must deal with the additional complications of communication and host failures.Leases are proposed as a time-based mechanism that provides efficient consistent access to cached data in distributed systems. Non-Byzantine failures affect performance, not correctness, with their effect minimized by short leases. An analytic model and an evaluation for file access in the V system show that leases of short duration provide good performance. The impact of leases on performance grows more significant in systems of larger scale and higher processor performance.