Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited · HackerPapers discussions

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — mentioned by to_ziegler

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:47:46 GMT

It's an insight from Heidi Howard et al. that came out after VSR: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696 and can be applied to VSR (and others). The basic idea is pretty simple. In VSR, there are two main phases: 1. Leader election 2. Normal replication / request processing Before Heidi Howard’s insight, these two phases typically used the same quorum size - for example, 4 out of 6 replicas. The key observation was that the two phases can actually use different quorum sizes, as long as the relevant quorums still intersect. With 6 replicas, we could use a quorum of 4 for view change and a quorum of…

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Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — mentioned by foota

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 03:08:45 GMT

I think that's a different thing... I believe you're talking about flexible paxos (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696). Flexible paxos doesn't change the underlying guarantees at all, whereas this does.

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Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — mentioned by mananaysiempre

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 10:21:26 GMT

The papers and talks[1] by Heidi Howard and Richard Mortier, in particular “Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”[2,3] and “Flexible Paxos”[4,5], are what finally made things click for me. A real implementation also needs other stuff[6], though, such as dynamic membership and state machine replication, which I still don’t know how to do. [1] https://fpaxos.github.io/ [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3380787.3393681 or https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K6kt39wyH0 [4] https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2016.25 or…

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Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — mentioned by jasonwatkinspdx

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 23:28:53 GMT

I think you'd be interested in Flexible Paxos[1] if you haven't run into it. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06696

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Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — mentioned by SEJeff

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 14:17:16 GMT

Funnily enough, there is a paper on exactly what you're referring to from Microsoft Research called "Flexible Paxos": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06696.pdf The gist of it is that there are realistically 2 quorums to be had: One for read/write to a cluster, and one for leader election. Assuming leader election is a relatively uncommon event (as it is in Paxos), you can require more quorum nodes for leader election while allowing less quorum nodes for quorum read/write. This means you get strong consistency with better performance. Distributed systems are one of my favorite things. I literally…

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Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — HN submission

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 08:41:46 GMT

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited

89 points; 13 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited — HN submission

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 01:46:15 GMT

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited

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