Tuning Paxos for High-Throughput with Batching and Pipelining

Paxos is probably the most known state machine replication protocol. Two optimizations that can greatly improve its performance are batching and pipelining. Their effectiveness depends significantly on the system properties, mainly network latency and bandwidth, but also on the CPU speed and properties of the application. This makes it hard to know when and how to use each optimization to achieve maximum throughput with Paxos. We address this question, first analytically, and then experimentally. The results show that although batching by itself is often sufficient to achieve maximum throughput in low latency networks, on a WAN setting it must be complemented with pipelining. Keywords-Paxos; Batching; Pipelining; Analytical study; Experimental evaluation