Consensus Memory Footprint

[ashwin153]

Right now the Paxos state for a transactions cannot be cleared until a newer, conflicting transaction is proposed. For example, an accepted transaction will continue to be stored in memory until another conflicting transaction is accepted. Over time, the memory footprint of the program could become massive.

At this point in time, I'm not sure of an elegant solution to this problem. One solution might be to introduce timeouts, after which the Paxos state for a transaction is automatically cleared. However, synchronizing timeouts across the cluster is a consensus problem in and of itself.