Performance of a XENIX distributed file system

The results of a series of experiments designed to measure the performance of Intel's distributed file system for an Ethernet local area network are summarized. The file system allows processes to access files stored on any node of the network, provided the process has the appropriate access permission. From informal observations, the authors theorized that system performance declined significantly as the ratio of remote to local file accesses increased. Experiments were conducted which measured system performance under various loads and ratios of remote to local accesses. Tests showed that on lightly loaded systems, remote files could be accessed with a limited loss in performance. On heavily loaded systems, however, remote file access seriously degraded system performance.<
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