Primarily disconnected operation: experiences with Ficus

Ficus is a flexible replication facility with optimistic concurrency control designed to span a wide range of scales and network environments. Support for partitioned operation is fundamental to the Ficus design but was not widely exercised in early Ficus use. This paper reports recent experiences using Ficus in settings where some replicas are only occasionally connected to a network, and hence partitioned operation is the rule rather than the exception. The authors conclude that with some tuning, Ficus adapted quite well to primarily disconnected operation