Jepsen finds 96 issues in Orkes ParticleDB

Orkes built ParticleDB to support its workflow orchestration platform, Conductor. The company engaged Jepsen to test versions of the database starting with 1.1.4. The builds provided for testing did not support replication features. ParticleDB's home page claimed the system was formally proven with a TLA+ proof and offered full ACID compliance with high throughput. However, no TLA+ specification was available during the collaboration. The performance claim was followed by text stating the system used snapshot isolation.

Jepsen found 96 issues with ParticleDB during testing. All but three of these issues occurred in healthy, single-node instances. Most transactions using the table-2pl mode took 10, 20, or even 30 seconds before failing. Version 1.1.18.6 frequently crashed spontaneously with no obvious cause or error messages. These spontaneous crashes no longer appeared in version 1.1.18.11.rc-18.