[hardwaresofton]

I'm not sure I agree -- reducing the number of round trips is definitely important in reducing latency for the system in the WAN context, a quote from the SDPaxos paper:

> In the wide area, latency is dominated by network communication,which is decided by the number of round trips, and the distance tothe replica to contact. The test for Multi-Paxos is omitted becauseits disadvantage is obvious: client has to communicate with theremote leader, as long as it is not co-located with the leader.The replicas and clients for wide-area experiments are deployedin California (CA), Oregon (OR), Ohio (OH), Ireland (IRE) and Seoul(SEL). The sequencer of SDPaxos locates in CA. The round-triptimes (ping latencies) between these regions are shown in Table 1.

I think this case is even worse than most real world cases people are dealing with today. Google/Facebook might have data centers this spread out, but I feel like 90% of the people who read that post will be worried about multiple regions in America.