Typical Deployment
In most deployments of Paxos, each participating process acts in three roles; Proposer, Acceptor and Learner. This reduces the message complexity significantly, without sacrificing correctness:
| “ | In Paxos, clients send commands to a leader. During normal operation, the leader receives a client's command, assigns it a new command number i, and then begins the ith instance of the consensus algorithm by sending messages to a set of acceptor processes. | ” |
By merging roles, the protocol "collapses" into an efficient client-master-replica style deployment, typical of the database community. The benefit of the Paxos protocols (including implementations with merged roles) is the guarantee of its safety properties.
A typical implementation's message flow is covered in the section Typical Multi-Paxos deployment.
Read more about this topic: Paxos (computer Science)
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