When an environment calls for an election, it will wait some amount of time for the other replicas in the replication group to respond. The amount of time that the environment will wait before declaring the election completed is the election timeout.

If the environment hears from all other known replicas before the election timeout occurs, the election is considered a success and a master is elected.

If only a subset of replicas respond, then the success or failure of the election is determined by how many replicas have participated in the election. It only takes a simple majority of replicas to elect a master. If there are enough votes for a given environment to meet that standard, then the master has been elected and the election is considered a success.

However, if not enough replicas have participated in the election when the election timeout value is reached, the election is considered a failure and a master is not elected. At this point, your replication group is operating without a master, which means that, essentially, your replicated application has been placed in read-only mode.

Note, however, that the Replication Manager will attempt a new election after a given amount of time has passed. See the next section for details.

You set the election timeout value using Environment.setReplicationTimeout(). You pass this method the ReplicationTimeoutType.ELECTION_TIMEOUT constant and a timeout value in microseconds.

In the event that a election fails (see the previous section), an election will not be attempted again until the election retry timeout value has expired.

You set the election timeout value using Environment.setReplicationTimeout(). You pass this method the ReplicationTimeoutType.ELECTION_RETRY constant and a retry value in microseconds.

Note that this constant is only valid when you are using the Replication Manager. If you are using the Base APIs, then this constant is ignored.