Re:Keeping Calm: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy
by lostcolony on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @12:29PM
(#24767104)
"In practice preparing for that kind of failure is a complete waste of time because you can never guarantee anything"
Oh, but you can. Hence the decades of research. And determining exactly what can be guaranteed, when, and what the tradeoffs are, is the whole point.
You're using refunds as a proxy for system correctness. That may make sense for your particular business case, but it doesn't make sense for many others. And it definitely isn't sufficient for a generic technical implementation that has to be able to be evaluated for an arbitrary business case.
In the 4 years of running this MMO we have had less than 0.3% refund because of network problems (including antivirus blocking of real-time messages, the MMO also uses HTTP). Personally I have never seen this database fail, it's much closer to perfect than any other distributed database if you count performance per watt and total cost of operation.