Книга: Distributed operating systems

2.3. THE CLIENT-SERVER MODEL

While ATM networks are going to be important in the future, for the moment they are too expensive for most applications, so let us go back to more conventional networking. At first glance, layered protocols along the OSI lines look like a fine way to organize a distributed system. In effect, a sender sets up a connection (a bit pipe) with the receiver, and then pumps the bits in, which arrive without error, in order, at the receiver. What could be wrong with this?

Plenty. To start with, look at Fig. 2-2. The existence of all those headers generates a considerable amount of overhead. Every time a message is sent it must be processed by about half a dozen layers, each one generating and adding a header on the way down or removing and examining a header on the way up. All of this work takes time. On wide-area networks, where the number of bits/sec that can be sent is typically fairly low (often as little as 64K bits/sec), this overhead is not serious. The limiting factor is the capacity of the lines, and even with all the header manipulation, the CPUs are fast enough to keep the lines running at full speed. Thus a wide-area distributed system can probably use the OSI or TCP/IP protocols without any loss in (the already meager) performance. Aith ATM, even here serious problems may arise.

However, for a LAN-based distributed system, the protocol overhead is often substantial. So much CPU time is wasted running protocols that the effective throughput over the LAN is often only a fraction of what the LAN can do. As a consequence, most LAN-based distributed systems do not use layered protocols at all, or if they do, they use only a subset of the entire protocol stack.

In addition, the OSI model addresses only a small aspect of the problem — getting the bits from the sender to the receiver (and in the upper layers, what they mean). It does not say anything about how the distributed system should be structured. Something more is needed.

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