Distributed recovery with K-optimistic logging

Fault-tolerance techniques based on checkpointing and message logging have been increasingly used in real-world applications to reduce service downtime. Most industrial applications have chosen pessimistic logging because it allows fast and localized recovery. The price that they must pay, however, is the higher failure-free overhead. In this paper, we introduce the concept of K-optimistic logging where K is the degree of optimism that can be used to fine-tune the tradeoff between failure-free overhead and recovery efficiency. Traditional pessimistic logging and optimistic logging then become the two extremes in the entire spectrum spanned by K-optimistic logging. Our approach is to prove that only dependencies on those states that may be lost upon a failure need to be tracked on-line, and so transitive dependency tracking can be performed with a variable-size vector. The size of the vector piggybacked on a message then indicates the number of processes whose failures may revoke the message, and K corresponds to the system-imposed upper bound on the vector size.