When a TCStore Dataset is cluster-resident, operations on that Dataset involve interactions with the cluster servers holding that Dataset. These interactions occur over TCP connections to the servers in the cluster. Stability of these connections and the servers supporting them necessarily affects operations against the Dataset. While communications with TSA servers is designed to be resilient, there is a limit to what can (or should) be handled without application involvement.

When creating a ClusteredDatasetManager, a TCP connection to a server in each TSA stripe is opened by the client. The TCP connection between a TCStore client and a Terracotta server is a full-duplex, bidirectional channel between client and server. When establishing a connection, the TCStore client uses the ClusteredDatasetManagerBuilder.withConnectionTimeout value to limit the amount of time permitted for the initial connections with the servers to be set up. Once a connection is established, the health of the connection is periodically assessed independently by server and client.