Thanks to aphyr for the testing. Certainly it will help focus efforts on improving things.<p>I am a MariaDB contributor and operate Percona Cluster in production, so I can talk a bit about Galera.<p>It&#x27;s recommended that writes go to one master, rather than be distributed across the nodes. That will help with isolation issues.<p>Also, some commenters have complained about year-old releases. PXC has improved significantly in the past year regarding manageability, so you may want to try again. For example, the startup script has a bootstrap option now.<p>For most people, vanilla async MySQL replication works best, esp. 5.6. But Galera gives you another option when you need something else.<p>Having said that, it takes 5-10 years for a database or filesystem to mature, so anybody using Galera now is an early adopter.