Abstract When the Asynchronous Method Invocation (AMI)

model was introduced into the CORBA specification, client applications benefited from the ability to invoke nonblocking 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-tim

Design and Performance of Asynchronous Method Handling for CORBA

This paper describes the design and performance of a new asynchronous method handling (AMH) mechanism that allows CORBA servers to process client requests asynchronously. AMH decouples the association of an incoming request from the run-time stack that received the request, without incurring the context-switching, synchronization, and data movement overhead of conventional CORBA multi-threading models. A servant upcall can therefore return quickly, while the actual work performed by the servant can run asynchronously with respect to other client requests