A New Real-Time Heartbeat Failure Detector

Heartbeat mechanism is the most effective technology to achieve the reliable communication of the High Availability (HA) system. But most of the traditional heartbeats are implemented in the application layer. This kind of method may cause detection instability while the scheduling and load are changed and thereby influence the detection efficiency of failure detection. To tackle those problems, this paper designs a new real-time heartbeat failure detector (HB-detector) running in the kernel which uses a new network heartbeat protocol and independent heartbeat line. This HB-detector is driven by core timer which can trigger an interrupt, and then the interrupt handling procedures will deal with the heartbeat packets. The design and implementation of the detector are described in this paper. The experimental result proves that the availability, real-time and robustness of the system are improved to a certain extent.