Paper: ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Do you really need to roll your own? ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems:
The ZooKeeper interface enables a high-performance service implementation. In addition to the wait-free property, ZooKeeper provides a per client guarantee of FIFO execution of requests and linearizability for all requests that change the ZooKeeper state. These design decisions enable the implementation of a high performance processing pipeline with read requests being satisfied byvlocal servers. We show for the target workloads, 2:1 to 100:1 read to write ratio, that ZooKeeper can handle tens to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. This performance allows ZooKeeper to be used extensively by client applications.
ZooKeeper achieves throughput values of hundreds of thousands of operations per second for read-dominant workloads by using fast reads with watches, both of which served by local replicas. Although our consistency guarantees for reads and watches appear to be weak, we have shown with our use cases that this combination allows us to implement efficient and sophisticated coordination protocols at the client even though reads are not precedence-ordered and the implementation of data objects is wait-free. The wait-free property has proved to be essential for high performance.
Although we have described only a few applications, there are many others using ZooKeeper. We believe such a success is due to its simple interface and the powerful abstractions that one can implement through this interface. Further, because of the high-throughput of ZooKeeper, applications can make extensive use of it, not only course-grained locking.
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- Via Neil Gunther
