Adaptive message packing for group communication systems

Abstract. Group communication is one of the main paradigms for implementing replication middleware. The high run-time costs of group communication may constitute a major performance bottleneck for modern enterprise applications. In this paper we investigate the applicability of message packing, a technique originally proposed by Friedman and Van Renesse in 1997 for improving the performance of group communication, to modern hardware and group communication toolkits. Most importantly, we extend this technique with a policy for varying the packing degree automatically, based on dynamic estimates of the optimal packing degree. The resulting system is adaptive in that it allows exploiting message packing efficiently in a dynamic and potentially unknown run-time environment. Several case studies are analyzed.