Reducing the Network Overheads of .NET Remoting through Runtime Call Aggregation

Modern application frameworks such as the Common Language Infrastructure (the core technology behind .NET) and Java are designed with sophisticated remoting capabilities at their core. This allows programmers to quickly and easily produce distributed applications using standard object-oriented techniques. Although this is largely beneficial, most object-oriented APIs are not well suited to remote usage where the cost of each method call can be orders of magnitude larger that a local one. This results in either the development of convoluted remote APIs or unnecessary performance penalties for applications using standard APIs. In this paper we present optimisations aimed at reducing the network overheads of .NET remoting applications without requiring the design of specialised remote APIs. These reductions are achieved by detecting and restructuring remote calls at runtime. In particular we focus on code reordering to enable aggregation of remote calls. These techniques are based on the work of Yeung and Kelly [22] who have implemented similar optimisation for Java’s RMI infrastructure. Initial testing shows that the optimisations we present can result in significant performance gains, especially for application that are not otherwise optimised for remote operation.