Designing an Efficient and Scalable Server-side Asynchrony Model for CORBA

  • Authors:

  • Darrell Brunsch;Carlos O'Ryan;Douglas C. Schmidt

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA

  • Venue:
  • OM '01 Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Optimization of middleware and distributed systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

When the Asynchronous Method Invocation (AMI) model was introduced into the CORBA specification, client applications benefited from the ability to invoke non-blocking two-way requests. In particular, AMI improved the scalability of clients by removing the restrictions associated with Synchronous Method Invocations (SMI). Server request handling remained synchronous, however, which minimized the benefits of AMI for middle-tier servers, such as firewall gateways and front-end database servers.This paper describes our strategy for implementing a scalable server-side asynchrony model for CORBA. We first outline the key design challenges faced when developing an Asynchronous Method Handling (AMH) model for CORBA and then describe how we are resolving these challenges in TAO, our high-performance, real-time CORBA ORB. In general, AMH-based CORBA servers provide more scalability than existing concurrency models, with only a moderate increase in programming complexity. Although targeted for CORBA, similar techniques can also be used in other method-oriented middleware, such as COM+ and Java RMI.