Towards the measurement of tuple space performance

Many applications rely upon a tuple space within distributed system middleware to provide loosely coupled communication and service coordination. This paper describes an approach for measuring the throughput and response time of a tuple space when it handles concurrent local space interactions. Furthermore, it discusses a technique that populates a tuple space with tuples before the execution of a benchmark in order to age the tuple space and provide a worst-case measurement of space performance. We apply the tuple space benchmarking and aging methods to the measurement of the performance of a JavaSpace, a current example of a tuple space that integrates with the Jini network technology. The experiment results indicate that: (i) the JavaSpace exhibits limited scalability as the number of concurrent interactions from local space clients increases, (ii) the aging technique can operate with acceptable time overhead, and (iii) the aging technique does ensure that the results from benchmarking capture the worst-case performance of a tuple space.