- In term of message overhead there is not much difference. one details is that each node keep incrementing his heartbeat counter continuously, making it a stat

- In term of message overhead there is not much difference. one details is that each node keep incrementing his heartbeat counter continuously, making it a state change that need to be propagated. - slower here depends on the number of node selected to gossip with. if you choose a long gossip period yes, but in real system the gossip period is short enough to not notice it. So slower means compared to Rumor-mongering style. Not as in having an inconsistent cluster state. -(Thanks) I will probably amend this as a note: A seed node can be any node in the cluster we know is reliable and will almost always be there; kind of like the ACE within your cluster, they can be many. -Garbage collection :"... We mitigate this by periodically garbage collecting obsolete nodes."