Performance Evaluation of Distributed Object Architectures

Abstract

The development of a Distributed Information System (DIS) can lead to critical bottlenecks because of the underlying architecture, which is becoming more and more complex. Today’s applications are both object-oriented and based on a new type of three-tiered client/server architecture. In this context, the capabilities of a DIS can be drastically reduced if the performances of the system are not sufficient. Recognizing these trends, industry and research are defining standards and technologies for communicating between components of a DIS and for database access mechanisms. The emerging candidates for these middleware technologies include the OMG’s CORBA specification and Microsoft’s proprietary solution known as DCOM. A key problem with such complex architectures is the performance issue. This paper proposes to evaluate the performance of an object-oriented DIS using a performance evaluation tool integrating analytical and simulation techniques. This tool is an extension of SMART, a performance evaluation tool for database applications, with distributed object models. These models are established using HOOMA, a hierarchical object-oriented modeling approach.

This work is supported by the European HELIOS ESPRIT project (22354). The project is developed in cooperation with EPFL, IONA, TransTOOLS, UIB and UoS.