Design and performance of asynchronous method handling for CORBA

Abstract

This paper describes the design and performance of a new mechanism, called asynchronous method handling (AMH), that allows CORBA servers to process client requests asynchronously. AMH decouples the association of an incoming request from the run-time stack that received the request, without incurring the context-switching, synchronization, and data movement overhead of conventional CORBA multithreading models. This paper provides two contributions to the study of asynchrony for CORBA servers. First, it describes the design and implementation of AMH in The ACE ORB (TAO), a C++ CORBA ORB. The syntax and semantics of AMH are defined using the CORBA Interface Definition Language (IDL), the forces that guided the design of AMH are described, and the patterns and C++ idioms used to resolve these forces are presented. Second, we empirically compare a middle-tier server implemented using AMH against other CORBA server concurrency models and show the advantages of the AMH mechanism against the other models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.