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Concluding Remarks

  In this paper, we described the design and implementation of Flex, a scalable and flexible distributed object caching system, on top of a CORBA compliant system running on the UNIX operating system. An important feature of Flex is that it supports flexible notions of object state consistency thus improving system performance through the use of weaker consistency levels when applicable. We presented issues that arise in an object caching system. We also argued how some of these issues led us to believe that object caching should be provided as a Common Object Service and not as part of the ORB itself. Our implementation experience indicates that object caching can considerably reduce latency in accessing shared distributed objects when applications exhibit a reasonable amount of locality. In particular, our experiments show that the overhead of caching an object can be amortized over less than four method invocations.

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank the referees of this paper for their many valuable comments. We would also like to thank Ajay Mohindra who helped clarify many implementation issues in DSOM (IBM's CORBA compliant system) to one of the authors during the author's summer internship at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.



Rammohan Kordale
Tue May 7 09:16:10 EDT 1996