Performance of the world's fastest distributed operating system

Abstract

Distributed operating systems have been in the experimental stage for a number of years now, but few have progressed to the point of actually being used in a production environment. It is our belief that the reason lies primarily with the performance of these systems---they tend to be fairly slow compared to traditional single computer systems. The Amoeba system has been designed with high performance in mind. In this paper some performance measurements of Amoeba are presented and comparisons are made with UNIX on the SUN, as well as with some other interesting systems. In particular, short remote procedure calls take 1.4 msec and long data transfers achieve a user-to-user bandwidth of 677 kbytes/sec. Furthermore, the file server is so fast that it is limited by the communication bandwidth to 677 kbytes/sec. The real speed of the file server is too high to measure. To the best of our knowledge, these are the best figures yet reported in the literature for the class of hardware used.