Resource Conservation in a Mobile Transaction System

This paper addresses the problem of providing transactional support for improved data consistency in mobile file access, while paying careful attention to the resource constraints of mobile clients. We present data on resource consumption from an implementation of the isolation-only transaction (IOT) mechanism of the Coda File System. The data shows that the resource conservation techniques used by the IOT mechanism do indeed result in modest demands on the three critical resources on a mobile client: CPU and I/O usage, disk space, and RVM space. Overall, our measurements confirm that even a severely resourceconstrained mobile client can benefit from the improved consistency offered by the IOT mechanism.