Object Caching in a CORBA Compliant System

Distributed object systems provide the key to building large scale applications that can execute on a range of platforms. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification from OMG attempts to address interoperability and heterogeneity issues that arise in such systems. Our goal is to investigate performance issues for distributed object systems. We claim that object caching is a must for improved performance and scalability in distributed object systems. However, this important technique and implementation issues related to it have not been widely studied in the context of distributed object systems and have not been addressed in CORBA specifications so far. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of Flex, a scalable and flexible distributed object caching system. Flex is built on top of Fresco, which uses the CORBA object model. Fresco runs on the UNIX operating system and our implementation of Flex exploits the features of object technology, Fresco, and UNIX. This system allows us to quantify the performance improvements for object invocations that are made possible by caching. *This work was supported in part by NSF grant CDA-9501637 and ARPA contracts N00174-93-K-0105 and DABT:63-95-C-0125. @ 1997 The USEND( Association, Computing Systems, Vol. 9 . No. 4 . Fall 1996 377