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Measurements of sharing in Multics

1977; Association for Computing Machinery; Volume: 11; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1145/1067625.806549

1943-586X

Warren A. Montgomery,

Distributed systems and fault tolerance

There are many good arguments for implementing information systems as distributed systems. These arguments depend on the extent to which interactions between machines in the distributed implementation can be minimized. Sharing among users of a computer utility is a type of interaction that may be difficult to provide in a distributed system. This paper defines a number of parameters that can be used to characterize such sharing. This paper reports measurements that were made on the M.I.T. Multics system in order to obtain estimates of the values of these parameters for that system. These estimates are upper bounds on the amount of sharing and show that although Multics was designed to provide active sharing among its users, very little sharing actually takes place. Most of the sharing that does take place is sharing of system programs, such as the compilers and editors.