Speed Up Your Database Client with Adaptable Multithreaded Prefetching

Authors:	Nils Knafla
Date:	August 1997
Type:	Paper presented at the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, HPDC-6 Portland, Oregon, 5-8th August 1997, IEEE Computer Society, pages 102-111
Institution:	Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University

Abstract

In many client/server object database applications, performance is limited by the delay in transferring pages from the server to the client. We present a prefetching technique that can avoid this delay, especially where there are several database servers. 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, multiple servers and different buffer pool sizes.

Nils Knafla, <nk@dcs.ed.ac.uk>