Orchestrating 5000 Workers Without Distributed Locks: Rediscovering TDMA

2 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by Horos

Item id: 46386053

2 Comments

wazokazi

14 hours ago

The workers sit idle for n-1 out of n time slices. As n gets larger, amount of work being done approaches zero.

Horos

13 hours ago

TDMA schedules the orchestrators (lightweight checks), not the workers (heavy jobs).

Orchestrators: Active 1/n of time (~10ms to check state) Workers: Run continuously for hours once started

T=0s: Orchestrator-0 checks → starts job (runs 2 hours) T=2s: Orchestrator-1 checks → job still running T=10s: Orchestrator-0 checks again → job still running

Think: traffic lights (TDMA) vs cars (drive continuously).

Work throughput is unchanged. TDMA only coordinates who checks when.