Client Cache Management in a Distributed Object Database

A distributed object database stores objects persistently at servers. Applications run on client machines, fetching objects into a client-side cache of objects. If fetching and cache management are done in terms of objects, rather than fixed-size units such as pages, three problems must be solved: 1. which objects to prefetch, 2. how to translate, or swizzle, inter-object references when they are fetched from server to client, and 3. which objects to displace from the cache. This thesis reports the results of experiments to test various solutions to these problems. The experiments use the runtime system of the Thor distributed object database and benchmarks adapted from the Wisconsin 007 benchmark suite. The thesis establishes the following points: 1. For plausible workloads involving some amount of object fetching, the prefetching policy is likely to have more impact on performance than swizzling policy or cache management policy. 2. A simple breadth-first prefetcher can have performance that is at worst roughly comparabl