Review of Grapevine System

From: Honghai Liu (liu789_at_hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 10:13:38 PST

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    Reviewer: Honghai Liu

     

    Grapevine is the distributed system that provides messaging, naming, authentication and resource location service

    in the early Internet age. And Grapevine was supposed to achieve high availability, system transparency to the users,

     scalability, easy operation and fast recovery from the failure of servers.

     

    From the implementation of this mail system, we can see it's quite similar to modern E-mail system. It provides

    naming or location of user and group to distribute messages. And it also provides storage for users to retrieve

    mails from either local server or remote servers.

     

    It is interesting to see that it is much more difficult to make modification to a live system like Grapevine, and most

     of the changes to the system were to fix unexpected problems in practice rather than to add new functionality to

    the system.

     

    One of the goals of Grapevine was the ability to increase system capacity over a large range by adding more
    servers of fixed power, rather than by using more powerful servers. However, I don't think the strategy was
    effective because of two reasons: First, the naming service(registrar) was flat, and with the growth of the users
    and groups in the system, the traffic loads increased much more than a linear function. I would image a hierarchy
    approach could have proven been more scalable. Second, the servers were deployed with few regards to the
    different reliability and performance of links between different sites. More consideration should have been given
    on how to confine the network traffic locally rather than let them travel over a slow telephone links.


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