Exercising application specific run-time control over clustering of objects

Support for dynamic reconfiguration permitting changes to the structure of an application while it is in operation is becoming more and more important for distributed applications. One use of such a reconfiguration facility would be to dynamically change the structure of an application in order to improve its performance. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a dynamic performance improvement scheme that is based on controlling clustering of persistent objects. Our scheme provides a means of dynamically reconfiguring storage structures of application objects, from no clustering (all objects treated as independent), to maximum clustering (all objects grouped together), including any intermediate level of clustering, to suit a given pattern of usage