Clustering

Clustering is a configuration operation for rippled servers that improves efficiency among mutually trusted servers. Clustering should only be used for servers that are located within the same datacenter and are operated by the same organization. Clustering provides the following benefits:

- Clustered servers share the work of cryptography. If one server has verified the authenticity of a message, the other servers in the cluster trust it and do not re-verify.
- Clustered servers share information about peers and API clients that are misbehaving or abusing the network. This makes it harder to attack all servers of the cluster at once.
- Clustered servers always propagate transactions throughout the cluster, even if the transaction does not meet the current load-based transaction fee on some of them.

If you are running a validator as a private peer, it's recommended to run a cluster of servers as proxies, since a cluster is more resilient to failure than individual servers.

Transaction Censorship Detection

The XRP Ledger is designed to be censorship resistant. In support of this design, the XRP Ledger provides an automated transaction censorship detector that is available on all rippled servers, enabling all participants to see if censorship is affecting the network.

While a rippled server is in sync with the network, the detector tracks all transactions that should have been accepted in the last round of consensus and included in the last validated ledger. The detector issues log messages of increasing severity when it sees transactions that have not been included in a validated ledger after several rounds of consensus.