A Study of Distributed Transaction Processing in an Internetwork

The rapid growth of interconnected computer networks has generated a lot of interest in migrating the distributed systems to a wide area network (WAN) environment, such as the Internet. We have developed mechanisms for studying the performance of the distributed transaction processing on the Internet, without actually having to move the database sites to remote Internet hosts. We have conducted experimental studies to analyze and understand the behavior of this transition on various transaction processing algorithms, such as concurrency control and atomicity control algorithms. The throughput, per-transaction response time, and abort rate of an industrial standard benchmark transactions have been measured and evaluated. We conclude that the optimization of the number of messages for atom-icity control is the single most important criteria for eeectiveness of the algorithm in the Internet environment. We also suggest some directions for improvement of both the communication facilities and the transaction processing algorithms.