A Performance Comparison of Monile Agents and RPC

The issue of Mobile Agent performance, and in particular, scalability is one that, while receiving attention in a speculative sense, has not been addressed to any great extent in empirical studies. This paper provides an insight into the requirements that an MA system has on a server's resources, comparing them to the requirements for an equivalent RPC solution. The basis of the study is an experiment that measures timing and system load information (CPU, memory, network and disk IO) as an MA and RPC solution performs a simple task.