JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERABAD B.Tech III Year DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS Previous Question Paper (January/February - 2023 - R18)

Fault tolerance is the ability of a distributed system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more of its components, such as processes, processors, or communication links. It ensures that the system maintains its required level of performance and availability despite these faults by employing techniques like redundancy, replication, and checkpointing.

Buffering and caching are both techniques used to improve system performance by managing data storage, but they serve different primary purposes:

• Buffering is primarily used to handle differences in data transfer rates or data unit sizes between a sender and a receiver. It acts as a temporary holding area to smooth out data flow, ensuring that a consumer is not starved of data or that a producer is not blocked by slow consumption.
• Caching is used to reduce latency and bandwidth usage by storing frequently accessed data in a faster, closer storage medium. It aims to provide quick access to data that has already been retrieved, avoiding the need to fetch it from the original, slower source again.
• Key Difference: Buffering is about synchronization and flow control between two entities, whereas caching is about optimizing access speed by reusing previously fetched data.