Determining the User-Level Transmission Delay in Networks of Workstations
Oliver Suciu, Christof W. Fetzer · 1997
The performance of many distributed system services, such as atomic broadcast, group membership, clock synchronization, etc., depends crucially on the message transmission delay, either one-way or round-trip, as experienced by the server processes communicating across the network. Usually the service specification assumes an a priori given constant as the maximum acceptable message delay, and leaves its final determination up to the service implementor. Often a timeout based on the transmission delay is the only parameter subject to adjustment, and its value determines to a great extent the runtime behavior of the service. Because of such important performance implications, a very careful choice must be made here, taking many aspects of the target system in consideration. This paper proposes a framework for the solution of this problem in networks of workstations, and illustrates its application by a suite of experiments performed in an environment consisting of Sun SPARCstation IPX machines, interconnected by an Ethernet LAN.