Chapter 12. Distributed Computing

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Distributed-application bottlenecks are of two general types. The first type occurs within application subcomponents. This type of bottleneck is essentially independent of the distributed nature of the application, and the other chapters in this book deal with how to tune this type of bottleneck. In this chapter, we deal with the second type of bottleneck, which occurs within the distribution infrastructure. This latter type of bottleneck is specific to the distributed nature of the application, and can be tuned using a number of techniques:

Caching

When an application repeatedly distributes the same data, a significant gain in performance can be obtained by caching the data, thus changing some distributed requests to local ones.

Compression

If the volume of data being transferred is large or causes multiple chunks to be transferred, then compressing the transferred data can improve performance by reducing transfer times.

Message reduction

Most distributed applications have their performance limited by the latency of the connections. Each distributed message incurs the connection-latency overhead, and so the greater the number of messages, the greater the cumulative performance delay due to latency. Reducing the number of messages transferred by ...

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