Measurements of DCE RPC performance in an OS/2 environment

Developing and managing applications for environments consisting of independently configured computing systems interoperating across network connections is of considerable interest in the commercial sector and presents many research challenges. The Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) has evolved to address the need for a vendor-neutral platform to which distributed applications can be developed. Central to the design philosophy of DCE is its reliance on the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) to facilitate communication among the entities in the distributed environment. Since it profoundly affects the performance of both the DCE environment and applications running on top of it, RPC's performance is very much a concern of both application developers and system managers in a DCE installation. To shed light on some of these issues, this paper reports results from an ongoing investigation of DCE RPC and its performance in a commercially-available implementation, for IBM's OS/2 operating system. The results obtained to this point show the effects of protocol processing, of network load, and of flow control mechanisms, and suggest areas for further study.