Performance of a Remote Instrumentation Program

Michael Kupfer

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-85-223
February 1985

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1985/CSD-85-223.pdf

One application of distributed computing is remote system instrumentation. Such instrumentation programs require good response with low overhead to provide timely results without disturbing the system being measured. A remote procedure call system, such as the Circus system developed at Berkeley, allows programmers to write distributed programs with little more effort than is required to write local programs. This paper compares a Circus-based implementation of a Berkeley UNIX tool (vmstat) with one based on the byte-stream protocol TCP. The Circus version makes for much cleaner code, but it requires more start-up time and higher CPU overhead than the TCP version. We conclude that the present incarnation of Circus is not acceptable for our work, but that future versions of Circus should prove valuable.


BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Kupfer:CSD-85-223,
    Author = {Kupfer, Michael},
    Title = {Performance of a Remote Instrumentation Program},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1985},
    Month = {Feb},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1985/5942.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-85-223},
    Abstract = {One application of distributed computing is remote system instrumentation.  Such instrumentation programs require good response with low overhead to provide timely results without disturbing the system being measured. A remote procedure call system, such as the Circus system developed at Berkeley, allows programmers to write distributed programs with little more effort than is required to write local programs. This paper compares a Circus-based implementation of a Berkeley UNIX tool (vmstat) with one based on the byte-stream protocol TCP. The Circus version makes for much cleaner code, but it requires more start-up time and higher CPU overhead than the TCP version. We conclude that the present incarnation of Circus is not acceptable for our work, but that future versions of Circus should prove valuable.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Kupfer, Michael
%T Performance of a Remote Instrumentation Program
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1985
%@ UCB/CSD-85-223
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1985/5942.html
%F Kupfer:CSD-85-223