Exercising Application Specific Run-time Control Over Clustering of Objects

Abstract

with persistent objects. A persistent object not in use is normally held in a passive state with its state residing in a stable disc-based object store and activated on demand (i.e., when an invocation is made) by loading its state and methods from the object store to the volatile store, and associating a server process for receiving RPC invocations. Further, an object provides a convenient unit for concurrency control, storage, replication and migration. Argus [1], Arjuna [2,3] and Guide [4] are just some of many systems designed broadly according to the model outlined above. Support for dynamic reconfiguration permitting changes to the structure of an application while it is in operation is becoming more and more important for distributed applications. One use of such a reconfiguration facility would be to dynamically change the structure of an application in order to improve its performance. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a dynamic performance improvemen..