Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System.

From: Chuck Reeves (creeves_at_windows.microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Feb 02 2004 - 10:35:32 PST

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    The paper, "Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed
    System", was published in 1984 by a number of employees from Xerox. It
    describes a distributed messaging and authentication system called
    Grapevine and some of their experiences in managing it. The capacity of
    the systems (128 Kbytes memory and 5 Mbytes of disk) they were using was
    limited relative to the amount of information they were managing.
    Grapevine's primary role was to support email. The designers of the
    system were rather ambitious as the system supported 4400 users, 1500
    groups on 17 geographically dispersed (Texas, California) servers
    connected via low bandwidth networks. The authors describe a number of
    problems surrounding the management of information in a distributed
    network. These included struggles to delays due to the locality of
    information; lack of network availability for inherently synchronous
    activity; efficient message distribution; and publication latency. Given
    the amount of work invested in this system I was surprised that they
    chose to use an unweighted graph as their model of the network. The
    support for interactive access to email on servers is still a real
    problem in Exchange today. Many of the choices made surrounding
    authentication and frequently unreliable links are similar to policy on
    Windows today. The remote maintenance model was quite advanced.
    Documentation of the design and behavior seems to have been a problem as
    I found this quote amusing: "we are slowly forgetting the details of the
    implementation and thus becoming less able to predict the consequences
    of changes."

    Chuck Reeves, creeves_at_microsoft.com
    Microsoft | Windows | Directory Services


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