To CATOCS or not to CATOCS, that is the …
Santosh Kumar Shrivastava · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 1994
In a recent paper [1], Cheriton and Skeen have examined the need for causally and totally ordered communication support (CATOCS) in a distributed system.After considering a number of application scenarios, they conclude that quite adequate solutions are obtainable from systems without CATOCS but including support for transactions operating on objects.Indeed, they go a step further and claim that CATOCS alone would not be able to deal with the ordering problems in the applications considered, and further that there are several performance problems in implementing CATOCS, so why bother with CATOCS?Why indeed!Not unexpectedly, rebuttals appeared from Comell [2], claiming that implementing applications on systems without CATOCS would be very hard and there are really no performance problems.