The per-campaign election watchdog was armed with a FIXED election_timeout_ms
(raft_start_election -> on_schedule_timeout -> raft_cb_schedule_timeout). Under
cold-connection churn a just-restarted survivor opens a fresh TCP+SSL endpoint
per vote round, so its single needed grant can land a hair AFTER a constant
deadline on EVERY campaign -- a resonance: the campaign times out, the term
re-escalates, and the now-stale grant is dropped (DropStaleResponse). Forever.
Terms climb unbounded; the freshest survivor never tallies quorum. This is the
final round-4 chaotic-soak election-liveness stall.
Fix (Ongaro thesis 3.4): re-randomize the watchdog per campaign to the canonical
[T, 2T] interval in the HA adapter, so some campaign's deadline falls AFTER its
grant RTT and the grant lands in-window. Done in raft_cb_schedule_timeout so the
pure (sim-tested) raft library stays deterministic. Independent of
election_jitter_max_ms (which tunes only the sub-second startup/stagger jitter)
so it spreads even when jmax is small/0; never below the configured floor so
genuine-loss failover is not sped up past election_timeout_ms.
Preserves Election Safety (no change to term/vote/DropStaleResponse logic).
new ha_jittered_election_delay() helper + 2 unit tests (RED verified: stubbing
jitter to 0 fails test_5_7_campaign_timeout_is_randomized with the resonance
message; PIN guards floor + modulo-by-zero). Suite: 24 Tests / 0 Failures.
Rongsong Shen
74784b2b18