Measurements of DCE RPC performance in an OS/2 environment

ABSTRACT

Developing and managing applications for environments consisting of independently configured computing systems interoperating across network connections is of considerable interest in the commercial sector and presents many research challenges. The Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) has evolved to address the need for a vendor-neutral platform to which distributed applications can be developed. Central to the design philosophy of DCE is its reliance on the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) to facilitate communication among the entities in the distributed environment. Since it profoundly affects the performance of both the DCE environment and applications running on top of it, RPC's performance is very much a concern of both application developers and system managers in a DCE installation. To shed light on some of these issues, this paper reports results from an ongoing investigation of DCE RPC and its performance in a commercially-available implementation, for IBM's OS/2 operating system. The results obtained to this point show the effects of protocol processing, of network load, and of flow control mechanisms, and suggest areas for further study.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Design studies

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.4 Parallel Architectures
          Subjects: Distributed architectures
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Network communications
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Measurement techniques

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.0 General

          Nouns: OS/2

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Distributed systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance, Theory