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QuePaxa

QuePaxa is a distributed consensus algorithm published in 2023 by researchers at EPFL (paper). It is designed to avoid the "tyranny of timeouts" imposed by leader-based protocols like Raft and Multi-Paxos, making it well-suited for wide-area networks with unpredictable latencies.

Key properties

  • Any replica can drive consensus — a leader exists for efficiency (1 round-trip vs 3+) but is not required for progress
  • Concurrent proposals constructively interfere — unlike Raft's leadership elections where concurrent candidates block each other, QuePaxa replicas work together to decide one of the proposed values
  • Designed for adversarial asynchrony — assumes a network where an imaginary adversary can launch targeted attacks on replica connections
  • No timeouts block progress — the system never becomes unavailable due to a single replica being down, unavailable, or degraded

Performance (from the paper)

The authors found QuePaxa maintains ~10× higher throughput than Raft and Multi-Paxos under adversarial network conditions (targeted connection attacks, variable latencies). These conditions more accurately resemble wide-area Internet networks than the conditions other consensus algorithms assume.

Industrial adoption

Meerkat (Cloudflare Research) is, to Cloudflare's knowledge, the first industrial deployment of QuePaxa at global scale — validated in proof-of-concept clusters with up to 50 replicas distributed worldwide.

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