Performance evaluation of Java RMI: a distributed object architecture for Internet based applications

With the explosive growth of the Internet and of network services, there is a proliferation of distributed applications such as e-commerce and other Web based applications that seek to leverage the power of the Internet. There have been several tools and standards for developing distributed applications including BSD sockets, RPC, and DCE. These have begun to evolve into object based distribution schemes such as Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). Java RMI is increasingly being used in Internet based applications as a Java only solution to the challenges facing distributed application developers. One of these challenges includes delivering better performance to end users. Hence it is important to study the performance parameters of RMI. The paper evaluates the performance of RMI empirically and compares its performance with the Java Sockets API. It also evaluates the benefits RMI offers to the developers of distributed applications. Thus Internet and Web based application developers gain an insight into the performance aspects and other tradeoffs involved when using the Java RMI distributed object architecture.