A Study of Distributed Transaction Processing in Wide Area Network
Bharat Bhargava, Yongguang Zhang · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 1994
Our research presents an experimental study that evaluates distributed transaction processing under the wide area network environments.Experiments that study the performance of wide area network communication have been completed.Several problems in message delivery and their impact in distributed transaction processing have been identified.We observed large variations ill the communicalion delay and pattern of fai.lures.We also conduded experiments by connecLing sites around the world using an emulation tool we developed.We measured the performance of the industrial standard DebitCrcdit benchmark transactions for sites involved in Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Finland, and nong Kong.We observed that the communication latcllcy in wide area network is a decisive factor for the transaction performance, and the size of the messages does not have a strong influence.We concluded that for a small multi-programming level between three and five yielded better throughput.We identified the bottleneck of a transaction processing system in a wide area network environment to be the atomicity control, three-phase commit was not a tolerable solution.We also suggested some directions of improvement in both communication facilities and transaction processing algorithms that we continue our research efforts.