DB design document

[linas@linas.org]

It's been rumoured that Al Snell said:
> 
> No way - RPC is far more lightweight than CORBA.

I am an rpc novice ... so excuse me, but what about the overhead of
having to contact 3 or 4 different servers, e.g. portmapper, statd,
rpciod, and all that?  My impression was that this wasn't
a particularly speedy operation.

By comparison, in 1997, I measured 2-8 milliseconds per corba call
(latency), over a 10base2 (coax cable) ethernet, betwen a 486 and
a pentium-133, using crappy ne2000 ethernet cards.   
See http://www.linas.org/linux/corba.html for details.

This aint great performance, but it aint terribly slow; acceptible,
I'd say, for lightweight duty.  And I beleive that rougly similar
figures would accrue to http/apache.  I find it hard to beleive that
rpc would do a whole lot better. 


--linas