A Practical Comparison Between the TAO Real-Time Event Service and the Maestro/Ensemble Group Communication System

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we present the results of a practical experience on the evaluation of two message-passing middleware platforms for developing distributed applications, i.e. the ACE/TAO Real Time Event Channel (RTEC) and the Maestro/Ensemble group communication toolkit (M/E). In particular, we compare their functionalities and their performances in a simple yet meaningful deployment configuration. The functional comparison points out the different characteristics of the two systems. In particular, M/E simplifies the coding of applications with strong requirements in terms of group membership tracking and ordered message delivery guarantees, while RTEC provides users with unreliable message delivery between loosely coupled processes. The performance comparison shows that, under stressing conditions, M/E sacrifices throughput stability for enforcing reliable and ordered message delivery, while RTEC offers a more stable throughput of unordered messages sacrificing message delivery reliability under heavy load. In normal operating conditions, the two systems perform almost similarly.