Principles of Operation

In our experience, Rendezvous distributed applications achieve optimal network performance when senders transmit messages in short batches, pausing briefly between batches. This observation is the foundation for the performance assessment tool.

Performance assessment software measures network performance by sending runs of messages, and compiling statistics. You can experiment by varying parameters such as message size, run length, batch size, pause interval—which affect the network data rate.

Each message contains s bytes of payload data (plus message headers and packet overhead).

rvperfm sends one or more sequences (or runs) of m messages to the network.

Instead of sending a continuous stream of messages, rvperfm groups them into batches of b messages, pausing for an interval of i seconds between the end of one batch and the start of the next batch.

While rvperfm is sending messages, zero or more process instances of rvperfs are listening for those messages and compiling statistics. At the end of each run, the rvperfs processes report back to rvperfm, which outputs the statistics.