Caching introduces the overbead and complexity of ensuring consistency, reducing some of its performance benefits. In a distributed system, caching must deal ,wit.h the additional complications of communication and host failures. Leases are proposed as a time-based mechanism that provides efficient consistent access to cached data in distributed systems. Non-Byzantine failures affect performance, not correctness, with their effect minimized by short leases. An analytic model and an evaluation for file access in the V system show that leases of short duration provide good performance. The impact of leases on performance grows more significant in systems of lar;ger scale and higher processor performance.
Lease protocol was originally proposed by Gray et al. REF and is used to provide efficient consistent access to cached data in distributed computer systems.
Leases: an efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency
SOSP '89
Computer Science