7.7.12. Causes of missing heartbeats in FD

Sometimes a member is suspected by FD because a heartbeat ack has not been received for some time T (defined by timeout and max_tries). This can have multiple reasons, e.g. in a cluster of A,B,C,D; C can be suspected if (note that A pings B, B pings C, C pings D and D pings A):

B or C are running at 100% CPU for more than T seconds. So even if C sends a heartbeat ack to B, B may not be able to process it because it is at 100%
B or C are garbage collecting, same as above.
A combination of the 2 cases above
The network loses packets. This usually happens when there is a lot of traffic on the network, and the switch starts dropping packets (usually broadcasts first, then IP multicasts, TCP packets last).
B or C are processing a callback. Let's say C received a remote method call over its channel and takes T+1 seconds to process it. During this time, C will not process any other messages, including heartbeats, and therefore B will not receive the heartbeat ack and will suspect C.