Question about responses to succesful NULL/empty appendentries i.e. heartbeats

[brucewayne]

I have been wondering if the leader really needs responses from followers to successful empty appendEntries?

The followers already respond with failure if the checks in appendentry fails and then the leader acts accordingly.

But what is the purpose of having responses for succesful empty appendentries from followers and what does it exactly achieve? The original paper does not explicitly mention anything about this.

If say, the election timeout is randomized somewhere between 150-300 milliseconds and the frequency of sending out empty appendentry RPCs is around 80-100 ms, then having leader track and receive empty appendentry responses would increase the network traffic unnecessarily.

I would like to know what everyone over here think about it and if we can avoid responding to successful empty appendentries.

Thanks.

[Oren Eini (Ayende Rahien)]

It is required so the leader will know whatever it is still the leader.

If the leader doesn't get enough replies within the election timeout to form a quorum, then it needs to step down.

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Oren Eini l CEO l Mobile: + 972-52-548-6969

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