Performance and Scalability of Client-Server Database Architectures
Alexios Delis, Nick Roussopoulos · 1992
Recent developments in software and hardware changed the way database systems are built and operate. In this paper we present database architectures based on the Client-Server paradigm and study their performance and scalability under different query/update workloads. The architectures are: Standard Client-Server, Client-Server with Multiple Disks, and Enhanced Client{Server. Data replication and client query result caching are used as the main mechanisms to improve the query throughput. The role of the server is to maintain system-wide data consistency and in the case of Enhanced Client-Server to selectively propagate updates on demand. Our study shows that except for the case of mostly update workloads, the Standard Client-Server architecture is outperformed by the other two architectures by one or more orders of magnitude. The Client-Server with Multiple Disks architecture offers performance comparable to that achieved by the Enhanced Client-Server for up to 100 clients, but the latter scales up a lot better for higher number of clients.