Speeding Up the Performance of a Distributed Coordination System
Shie-Yuan Wang, Ting-Wei Yu · 2025
A distributed coordination system (DCS) provides many useful services such as in-memory data store and distributed synchronization of data. ZooKeeper, which is being actively developed by the Apache Software Foundation as a project, is one of the most popular DCSes in the world. ZooKeeper uses multiple unicast TCP connections to forward the submitted data to all servers in its cluster, using one TCP connection for each server. However, this design will greatly waste link bandwidth when the number of servers in the cluster is increased for providing higher read performance for a large number of clients. In this work, we integrate the IP multicast capability of a hardware switch with an IP multicast software tool to replace these multiple TCP connections. Experimental results show that when 7 servers are used to build ZooKeeper, the speedup of the throughput of our approach (in terms of requests per second) against ZooKeeper can be up to 5x.