Measuring RPC traffic in an OS/2 DCE environment

Distributed computing involves systems that operate across networks transparently, using the resources of multiple machines. The Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) has evolved to address the need for a vendor-neutral platform to which distributed applications can be developed, and upon which they can run. Central to the design philosophy of DCE is its reliance on the remote procedure call (RPC) to facilitate communication among the entities in the distributed environment. Since it profoundly affects the performance of both the DCE environment and applications running on top of it, the performance of RPCs is very much a concern of both application developers and system managers in a DCE installation. This paper reports some results from an ongoing empirical investigation of the OS/2 DCE RPC facility. Our interest in this project is the effect on end-to-end RPC performance of protocol processing, flow control mechanisms within DCE, other load on the network, and interoperation with multiple DCE platforms.