Document Type

Technical Report

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Publication Date

1997-01-01

Filename

WUCS-97-10.PDF

Technical Report Number

WUCS-97-10

Abstract

The Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) enables heterogeneous CORBA-compliant Object Request Brokers (ORBs) to interoperate over TCP/IP networks. The IIOP uses the Common Data Representation (CDR) transfer syntax to map CORBA Interface Definition Langauge (IDL) data types into a bi-canonical wire format. Due to the excessive marshaling/demarshaling overhead, data copying, and high-levels of function call overhead, conventional implementation of IIOP protocols yield poor performance over high-speed networks. To meet the demands of emerging distributed multimedia applications, CORBA-compliant ORBs must support both interoperable and highly efficient IIOP implementations. This paper provides two contributions to the study and design of high performance CORBA IIOP implementations. First, we precisely pinpoint the key sources of overhead in the SunSoft IIOP implementation (which is the standard reference implementation of IIOP written in C++) by measuring its performance for transferring richly-typed data over a high speed ATM network. Second, we empirically demonstrate the benefits that stem from systematically applying protocol optimizations to SunSoft IIOP. These optimizations include: optimizing for the expected case; eliminating obvious waste; replacing general purpose methods with specialized, efficient ones; precomputing values, if possible; storing redundant state to speed up expensive operations; and passing information between layers. The results of applying these optimization principles to SunSoft IIOP improved its performance 1.8 times for doubles, 3.3 times for longs, 3.75 times for shorts, 5 times for chars/octets, and 4.2 times for richly-typed structs over ATM networks. Our optimized implementation is now competitive with existing commercial ORBs using the static invocation interface (SII) and 2 to 4.5 times (depending on the data type) faster than commercial ORBs using the dynamic skeleton interface (DSI). Moreover, our optimizations are fully CORBA compliant and we maintain strict interoperability with other IIOP implementations cush as Visigenic's VisiBroker and IONA's Orbix.

Comments

Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7C827HS

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