Patent ID: 8838723

Claim:
A computer-implemented method to manage availability of a plurality of slave components executing in a distributed system by maintaining, for at least a first slave component selected from the plurality of slave components, an availability state indicating a health status of the first slave component, the availability state comprising one of, in decreasing order of health, first, second, and third availability states, the method comprising: sending a plurality of multicast heartbeat requests to the plurality of slave components executing in the distributed system; upon determining that a count of unicast heartbeat acknowledgments not received from the first slave component exceeds a first predefined threshold, transitioning from the first availability state to the second availability state, whereafter receipt of a unicast heartbeat acknowledgment from the first slave component causes a transition back to the first availability state; and upon determining that the count of unicast heartbeat acknowledgments not received from the first slave component exceeds a second predefined threshold greater than the first predefined threshold, transitioning from the second availability state to the third availability state by operation of one or more computer processors, whereafter a successful restart of the first slave component causes a transition back to one of the first and second availability states, wherein the first, second, and third availability states are in decreasing order of health.