Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University
Abstract
Given the existence of powerful multiprocessor
client workstations in many client-server object database
applications, the performance bottleneck is the delay in transferring
pages from the server to the client. We present a prefetching
technique that can avoid this delay, especially where the client
application requests pages from several database servers. This
technique has been added to the EXODUS storage manager. Part of the
novelty of this approach lies in the way that multithreading on the
client workstation is exploited, in particular for activities such as
prefetching and flushing dirty pages to the server. Using our own
complex object benchmark, we analyze the performance of the
prefetching technique with multiple clients and multiple servers. The
technique is also tested under a variety of client host workload
levels.