A relational approach to monitoring complex systems
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
A bibliography of parallel debuggers, 1990 edition
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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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.