What is CommitTimeout for? about raft HOT 3 CLOSED

Yeah, it's a subtle detail of how we've implemented raft. It's from section 5.3 on log replication. For a number of reasons, we do the heartbeats async from the AppendEntries with actual log data. Mostly it's to avoid head of line blocking on network and disk. Because of this decoupling, heartbeat does not include the leaderCommit value (highest committed index), since the replication may be lagging (any number of reasons). We only send that value in the replication stream. As a result, suppose I commit log at index 10. If there is no more write operations (e.g. nothing at index 11), then there is no way to update the leaderCommit of the followers. We use a CommitTimeout to instead replicate no logs, but to update the leaderCommit of the followers. In practice, it works the same as doing it in the heartbeat, but we avoid a number of other issues in favor of higher stability.

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Thanks for clarifying that. I’m still wondering, though: wouldn’t it be enough to trigger one additional AppendEntries after a successful commit to get leaderCommit to the followers, instead of sending 20/s (default setting)? :)

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Indeed. We used to do that :) But in practice you get all sorts of fun situations like a user restarting Consul in a way that causes data loss (e.g. replication log moves backward in time). With the no-op optimization we end up missing that and stalling the replication. Doing the AppendEntries is relatively cheap.

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