Analysis of transaction management performance

Abstract

There is currently much interest in incorporating transactions into both operating systems and general-purpose programming languages. This paper provides a detailed examination of the design and performance of the transaction manager of the Camelot system. Camelot is a transaction facility that provides a rich model of transactions intended to support a wide variety of general-purpose applications. The transaction manager's principal function is to execute the protocols that ensure atomicity. The conclusions of this study are: a simple optimization to two-phase commit reduces logging activity of distributed transactions; non-blocking commit is practical for some applications; multithreaded design improves throughput provided that log batching is used; multicasting reduces the variance of distributed commit protocols in a LAN environment; and the performance of transaction mechanisms such as Camelot depend heavily upon kernel performance.