The Relative Importance of
Concurrent Writers and Weak Consistency Models
The Relative Importance of
Concurrent Writers and Weak Consistency Models
Files
Publication or External Link
Date
1998-10-15
Authors
Keleher, Pete
Advisor
Citation
DRUM DOI
Abstract
This paper presents a detailed comparison of the relative
importance of allowing concurrent writers versus the choice of the
underlying consistency model. Our comparison is based on single- and
multiplewriter versions of a lazy release consistent (LRC) protocol, and
a single-writer sequentially consistent protocol, all implemented in the
CVM software distributed shared memory system.
We find that in our environment, which we believe to be
representative of distributed systems today and in the near future, the
consistency model has a much higher impact on overall performance than
the choice of whether to allow concurrent writers. The multiple writer
protocol performs an average of 9% better than the single writer LRC
protocol, but 34% better than the single-writer sequentially consistent
protocol. Set against this, MW-LRC required an average of 72% memory
overhead, compared to 10% overhead for the single-writer protocols.