Patent ID: 6990608

Claim:
A method of handling cluster failures in a transaction processing system operating with a registration protocol, the transaction processing system including a network of interconnected processing clusters, each cluster including a plurality of processing units each having a CPU and volatile storage and access to stable storage, the method comprising: receiving, at a processing unit, a message that a processing unit has been reported to be down; receiving, at the processing unit, one or more network transactions distributed from a broadcast owner of the transactions, the processing unit having resident thereon, a first list having elements indicative of transactions with outstanding registration requests, a second list having elements indicative of processes waiting for a registration response for a particular transaction, and a third list having elements indicative of currently running processing units; examining the elements of the first list to determine which transactions on the list have outstanding registration requests; for each transaction on the list having an outstanding registration request, if the down processing unit hosted the broadcast owner for the transaction, receiving responses to any outstanding registration requests sent to the broadcast owner; and if the down processing unit did not host the broadcast owner, examining the elements of the second list for the transaction, to determine whether the down processing unit is a backup processing unit for the processing unit, and if the down processing unit is the backup processing unit, receiving responses to any outstanding registration requests to enable the processing unit to process the loss of its backup processing unit; and removing the element indicative of the down processing unit from the third list.