The Abortion Rate of Lazy Replication Protocols for Distributed Databases

Lazy update protocols have proven to have an undesirable behavior due to their high abortion rate in scenarios with high degree of access conflicts. In this paper, we present the problem of the abortion rate in such protocols from an statistical point of view, in order to provide an expression that predicts the probability of an object to be out of date during the execution of a transaction. It is also suggested a pseudo-optimistic technique that makes use of this expression to reduce the abortion rate caused by accesses to out of date objects. The proposal is validated by means of simulations of the behavior of the expression. Finally, the application of the presented results to improve lazy update protocols is discussed, providing a technique to theoretically determine the boundaries of the improvement.