Analyzing Performance of Lease-Based Schemes under Failures

Leases have proved to be an effective concurrency control technique for distributed systems that are prone to failures. However, many benefits of leases are only realized when leases are granted for approximately the time of expected use. Correct assessment of lease duration has proven difficult for all but the simplest of resource allocation problems. In this paper, we present a model that captures a number of lease styles and semantics used in practice. We consider a few performance characteristics for lease-based systems and analytically derive how they are affected by lease duration. We confirm our analytical findings by running a set of experiments with the OO7 benchmark suite using a variety of workloads and fault loads.