Sprite position statement: use distributed state for failure recovery

Abstract

The authors advocate keeping state in main memory instead of logging state to disk, so that higher performance services can be implemented. They are motivated by their distributed file system which uses stateful servers to support a high-performance distributed caching system. For reliability, a server's state is replicated in the main memory of other hosts so that the system can recover from the failure of a server. After a server reboots, its clients help it rebuild its internal state. The authors point out that as networks and processors get faster, but disks do not, relying on other hosts will be more efficient than using disks.<>