This paper was submitted to Transactions on Computer Systems. Distributed System Fault Tolerance Using Sender-Based Message Logging

in Sender-based message logging supports transparent fault tolerance in distributed sys-tems in which all communication is through messages and all processes execute deter-ministically between received messages. It uses a pessimistic message logging protocol that requires no specialized hardware. Sender-based message logging differs from previ-ous message logging methods in that it logs each message in the local volatile memory of the machine from which it was sent, thus greatly reducing the overhead of message logging. Overhead is further reduced by relaxing the synchronization imposed by pre-vious pessimistic message logging protocols. Sender-based message logging guarantees recovery from a single failure at a time in the system, and detects all cases in which multiple failures prevent recovery. Extensions are also presented to support optimistic recovery from multiple failures at once.- / 2A-( Sender-based message logging has been implemented under the V-System on a network of SUN-3/60 workstations. The measured overhead on V-System communication op-erations is about 25 percent. The overhead experienced by distributed application programs using sender-based message logging is affected most by the amount of com