Towards High-Performance Multithreaded CORBA Servers

Abstract

Parallel platforms have become widely available. Moderately priced commodity SMPs are now manufactured by most major hardware vendors. Platform independent software environments, emphasizing a transparent programming model for building distributed applications, are rapidly emerging. In this paper we demonstrate how to combine the transparency characteristics of these environments with the high-performance features of the affordable server technology. We integrate the thread-per-request concurrency model into CORBA servers while providing high-performance. We demonstrate that thread creation overhead can be minimal and is merely attribute to the thread package used. We introduce and evaluate optimization techniques for increasing overall server performance. These techniques are based on increasing locality of reference for the client-server interaction.