The Performance of Paxos and Fast Paxos

Abstract

Paxos and Fast Paxos are optimal consensus algorithms that are simple and elegant, while suitable for efficient implementation. In this paper, we compare the performance of both algorithms in failure-free and failure-prone runs using Treplica, a general replication toolkit that implements these algorithms in a modular and efficient manner. We have found that Paxos outperforms Fast Paxos for small number of replicas and that collisions are not the cause of this performance difference.