Performance considerations for distributing services-a case study: mass storage

The partitioning of operating system services in a distributed system and its impact on performance are discussed. An examination is made of the tradeoff between partitioning a service at a higher layer, which could potentially result in greater computation at the server, and partitioning at a lower layer, which could result in less service-related computation at the server but may require more communication with the server. As a case study, the performance implications of providing alternate types of distributed mass storage services are considered, focusing on those partitionings that result in a file and a disk service. A detailed multiclass closed queuing network model of the remote service with users on workstations is used in the study