Our experience with operation shipping, although it is limited only to the application-transparent case, is entirely favorable. We have implemented a prototype by extending the Coda File System, and have demonstrated that operation shipping can achieve substantial performance improvements.
Efficient update propagation is important for insulating users from the unpleasant consequences of low bandwidth networks. Indeed, without this capability, performance may be sufficiently degraded that users are tempted to forgo the transparency benefits of a distributed file system, and rely on explicit copying of local files instead. Our results suggest that operation shipping can play an important role in the design of future distributed file systems for bandwidth-challenged environments.