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Welcome to the Chinese-Whispers wiki!

Introduction

This system is a gossip based state replication service. The system uses UDP datagrams for network messaging transport. The result is a very light weight system that does not consume a lot of CPU nor network bandwidth to provide these services.

The system provides a model where each node may have one or more pieces of binary replicated state. Each piece of state is assigned a unique identity within the system and these pieces of state may be updated or deleted. Note that because this is a datagram based service, each unique piece of replicated state is limited in size - you can't use this system to replicate a bunch of even moderately large pieces of state.

This service is designed to quickly and cheaply replicate small pieces of state that are key to setting up to larger contexts that can then more efficiently maintain larger segments of state.

Dependencies

The Chinese Whisper replication service requires accurate system clocks with minimal skew across all the member nodes. This means that NTP (the network time protocol) is required to be run to synchronize all the members to the same time base. The system can tolerate a reasonably wide skew between the nodes, but given the ubiquity and necessity of NTP in modern distributed services, there really is no reason you shouldn't be running NTP on all your nodes. Fair warning, though: if you forget to synchronize the member's clocks, you will not have a working system.

Further reading

• System design and architecture
• Instance construction
• Usage
• Configuration
• To Do