8.5. Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication

Synchronous replication blocks a thread or caller (for example on a put() operation) until the modifications are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. By waiting for acknowledgments, synchronous replication ensures that all replications are successfully applied before the operation is concluded.

Asynchronous replication operates significantly faster than synchronous replication because it does not need to wait for responses from nodes. Asynchronous replication performs the replication in the background and the call returns immediately. Errors that occur during asynchronous replication are written to a log. As a result, a transaction can be successfully completed despite the fact that replication of the transaction may not have succeeded on all the cache instances in the cluster.