research-article

From causality to stability: understanding and reducing meta-data in CRDTs

Authors:

Elisa Gonzalez BoixAuthors Info & Claims

MPLR '20: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

Pages 3 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3426182.3426183

Published: 04 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Modern distributed applications increasingly replicate data to guarantee both high availability of systems and optimal user experience. Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a family of data types specially designed for highly available systems that guarantee some form of eventual consistency. To ensure state convergence between replicas, CRDT implementations need to keep track of additional meta-data. This is not a scalable strategy, as a growing amount of meta-data has to be kept.

In this paper, we show that existing solutions for this problem miss optimisation opportunities and may lead to less reactive CRDTs. For this, we analyse the relation between meta-data and the causality of operations in operation-based CRDTs. We explore a new optimisation strategy for pure operation-based CRDTs and show how it reduces memory overhead. Our approach takes advantage of the communication layer providing reliable delivery to determine causal stability, and as a result, meta-data can be removed sooner. We furthermore propose a solution for improving the reactivity of CRDTs built on a reliable causal broadcasting layer.

We apply our strategy to pure-operation based CRDTs and validate our approach by measuring its impact on several different set-ups. The results show how our approach can lead to significant improvements in meta-data cleanup when compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

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Cited By

Rabeshko YTurbal Y(2024)Performance optimisation techniques for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT)Вісник Черкаського державного технологічного університету10.62660/bcstu/1.2024.2329:1(10-23)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.62660/bcstu/1.2024.23
Bauwens JBoix E(2021)Improving the Reactivity of Pure Operation-Based CRDTsProceedings of the 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3447865.3457968(1-6)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447865.3457968

Index Terms

From causality to stability: understanding and reducing meta-data in CRDTs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Garbage collection
    2. Software functional properties
      1. Correctness
        Consistency
        Synchronization

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Modern distributed applications increasingly replicate data to guarantee both high availability of the system and an optimal user experience. Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a family of data types specially designed for highly available ...

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cover image ACM Other conferences

MPLR '20: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

November 2020

97 pages

ISBN:9781450388535

DOI:10.1145/3426182

Program Chair:
Stefan Marr
University of Kent, UK

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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Published: 04 November 2020

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MPLR '20

MPLR '20: 17th International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

November 4 - 6, 2020

Virtual, UK

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Cited By

Rabeshko YTurbal Y(2024)Performance optimisation techniques for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT)Вісник Черкаського державного технологічного університету10.62660/bcstu/1.2024.2329:1(10-23)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.62660/bcstu/1.2024.23
Bauwens JBoix E(2021)Improving the Reactivity of Pure Operation-Based CRDTsProceedings of the 8th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data10.1145/3447865.3457968(1-6)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447865.3457968

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