Status: IN
Membership and data convergence operate at fundamentally different rates: gossip-based membership changes propagate in O(log N) rounds via epidemic-style random peer selection, but data convergence in ring topology requires O(N) sync rounds because each round advances changes by exactly one hop via store-and-forward requeuing — creating a window proportional to cluster size where the membership view is current but data remains stale.
O(log N) membership convergence vs O(N) data convergence creates a growing window where the cluster knows who's alive but hasn't finished replicating — the gap widens with cluster size
Depends on (SL): gossip-convergence-is-olog-n, ring-topology-convergence-is-linear-in-node-count