Performance of a Remote Instrumentation Program

Abstract

One application of distributed computing is remote system instrumentation. Such instrumentation programs require good response with low overhead to pr~ vide timely results without disturbing the system being measured. A remote pr~ cedure call system, such as the Circus system developed at Berkeley, allows pr~ grammers to write distributed programs with little more effort than is required to write local programs. This paper compare!! a Circus-based implementation or a Berkeley UNIXt tool (vmstat) with one based on the byte-stream protocol TCP.The Circus version makes for much cleaner code, but it requires more start-up time and higher CPU overhead than the TCP version. We conclude that the present incarnation or Circus is not acceptable for our work, but that future versions of Circus should prove valuable.

A relational approach to monitoring complex systems

“…The optimization phase should be implemented, and its effectiveness studied. The remote monitor should be extended to permit communication with multiple resident monitors (e.g., by using remote procedure call [35]). Eventually, the relational monitor should be coupled with a suitable programming environment to form an integrated instrumentation environment [59].…”