On using Network Memory to Improve the Performance of Transaction-Based Systems

Sotiris Ioannidis Evangelos P. Markatos Julia Sevaslidou
Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Group
Institute of Computer Science (ICS)
Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Crete
P.O.Box 1385
Heraklio, Crete, GR-711-10 GREECE
markatos@ics.forth.gr
tel: +(30) 81 391655 fax: +(30) 81 391601

Technical Report 190, ICS-FORTH
htpp://www.ics.forth.gr/proj/avg/paging.html

Abstract:

Transactions have been valued for their atomicity and recoverability properties that are useful to several systems, ranging from CAD environment to large-scale databases. Unfortunately, adding transaction support to an existing data repository was traditionally thought to be expensive, mostly due to the fact that the performance of transaction-based systems is usually limited by the performance of the magnetic disks that are used to hold the data repository. In this paper we describe how to use the collective main memory in a Network of Workstations (NOW) to improve the performance of transaction-based systems. We describe the design of our system and its implementation in two independent transaction-based systems, namely EXODUS, and RVM. We evaluate the performance of our prototype using several database benchmarks (like OO7 and TPC-A). Our experimental results indicate that our system delivers up to two orders of magnitude performance improvement compared to its predecessors.

• Introduction
• Remote-Memory-based Transaction Systems
  • Reliable Main Memory
  • EXODUS and RVM
  • Recovery
  • Implementation
• Experimental Evaluation
  • RVM performance
    • Experimental Environment
  • I/O Block Size
  • The Size of the Log
  • Random Accesses
  • Network Load
  • Server Load
  • TPC-A
  • EXODUS
    • Experimental Environment
    • OO7
• Related Work
• Conclusions
• References
• About this document ...