A Critique of the CAP Theorem · HackerPapers discussions

A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by NortySpock

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:51:08 GMT

A Critique of the CAP theorem by Martin Kleppmann. https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 Basically naive CAP theorem assumes "no latency (delay) allowed", in which case, yeah, sure, the quorum must agree or you are writing to a split-brain quorum somehow. But what if delay sensitivity is a knob that can be tuned, and writes have conflict resolution? Martin Kleppmann's book Designing Data-Intensive Applications is considered a useful tome for anyone who needs a insight in the complexity involved in distributed systems (hint: getting data in ram flushed to an SSD also involves multiple moving parts)

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by tajd

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 12:38:07 GMT

For the interested reader you can see a paper talking about this by Martin Kleppmann https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 - the author of DDIA.

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by sethammons

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:48:02 GMT

Related: A Critique of CAP Theorem by Martin Kleppman https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 TL;DR: terms in CAP are not adequately defined and he proposes a delay-sensitive framework.

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by TheDong

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 18:35:02 GMT

> I don't think you realise how simple and fundamental the CAP theorem is May I recommend reading "A Critique of the CAP Theorum - Martin Kleppmann", available as a PDF here https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 As that paper points out, your definition of CAP theorem is simplified and incomplete to the point of being wrong, as many are. As it also point out, CAP theorem doesn't really account for eventual consistency well. I would argue that a chat protocol is a good place to perform eventual consistency, and those tradeoffs work well. During network partitions, have both sides of the partition…

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — HN submission

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 18:36:09 GMT

A Critique of the CAP Theorem

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by thraxil

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:06:59 GMT

Martin Kleppmann's "A Critique of the CAP Theorem" lays this all out very nicely and goes further, providing a better conceptual framework for discussing the tradeoffs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 One of the best papers I've come across in the last few years.

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by pron

Sun, 18 Oct 2015 14:10:02 GMT

Two things. 1. The notion of "high availability" wasn't used much before "web scale" applications. 2. As others have said, the CAP theorem is kind of tautological and does more to confuse about what's possible than to clarify. For example, the CAP theorem implies that even eventual consistency is impossible in the case of partitions. If partitions can be of infinite length then no kind of consistency is possible; if partitions are finite, then all kinds of consistency are possible (with "availability" meaning very high latency, though). In short, the CAP theorem itself doesn't contribute much…

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — mentioned by _Codemonkeyism

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 09:08:26 GMT

Concerning his claims about CAP and that their cluster is neither C nor A, because of P, while Percona claims it is CA, some days ago a paper was linked here "A Critique of the CAP Theorem" - http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 which I found very englighting about the P in CAP.

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A Critique of the CAP Theorem — HN submission

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 17:20:26 GMT

A Critique of the CAP Theorem

100 points; 39 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.