Efficient distributed implementation of semi-replicated synchronous groupware
T.C. Nicholas Graham, Tore Urnes, Roy Nejabi · 1996
The Model View Controller (MVC) architecture has proven to be an effective way of organizing synchronous groupware applications. Distributed implementations of MVC, however, can suffer from poor performance. This paper demonstrates how optimized semi-replication of MVC architectures can lead to good performance over both local and wide area networks. We present a series of optimizations to network communication based on specific communication properties of groupware. These optimizations have been implemented in the Clock groupware development toolkit, allowing programmers to develop applications directly in the high-level MVC style, with Clock automatically providing optimized performance. Timings of an application developed in Clock show that usable speed was obtained in a highly interactive groupware application running between Toronto and Calgary, with a typical latency of 190 ms per round trip message. The paper discusses the tradeoffs involved in the algorithms, and presents timings to demonstrate the effectiveness of the different approaches. The timings show that when running over a wide area network, the best optimization can achieve a factor 60 speedup over the naive implementation of distributed MVC.