Efficient Treatment of Failures in RPC Systems

: This paper addresses extensions to be made to a basic remote procedure call system for the integration of primitive fault tolerance measures. Our main design goal is to not introduce performance penalty for remote procedure calls executing in the absence of failures, and to not impose significant overhead by the treatment of failures. Basically, extensions include a simple algorithm that finds and eliminates orphans, and a mechanism that detects abnormally terminated remote calls. Our solution for orphan detection is based on the extermination approach, its efficiency coming from a minor addition to the system architecture that allows the implementation of high speed stable storage. Performance measures given by the implementation of our reliability mechanisms on top of the Mach 3.0/BSD UX36 operating system show that the mechanisms are responsible for adding only 1% overhead on the operating system's base remote procedure call. Key-words: Distributed systems, fault tolerance, remot..