Leader backs up followers quickly with persistance

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Saif Mohamed

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Mar 17, 2026, 12:48:40 AM (3 days ago) Mar 17
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Currently I'm trying to build a layer of distributed state machine with Raft following this paper: http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.5840/2025/papers/raft-extended.pdf
Course: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/

The problem appeared when I introduced the persistence layer (disk) to my log replication logic. There are situations where agreement on a specific entry cannot be reached because of time limit exceeded (a time-frame the entry should be replicated inside of).

Mainly, when there is a heavy randomized leader failure, the followers don't get the chance to fully back up their log. This problem didn't appear previously without persistence in the picture.

My question is: does the TLA+ tool help me identify the true problem in case I'm already identifying it wrong?

Any thoughts or recommendations will be helpful, thanks.

Andrew Helwer

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Mar 18, 2026, 1:32:08 PM (2 days ago) Mar 18
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Hi Saif,

Trying to understand - you're saying that your replicas can die in between confirming/choosing a value and writing it to disk, and so this leads to chosen values being lost to the cluster since the non-persisted values are gone when they come back up?

Andrew

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