Implementing High Performance Multicast in a Managed Environment

Component integration environments such as Microsoft .NET and J2EE have become widely popular with application developers, who benefit from standardized memory management, system-wide type checking, debugging, and performance analysis tools that operate across component boundaries. This pa-per describes QuickSilver Scalable Multicast (QSM), a new multicast platform designed to achieve high performance in managed environments. Memory-related overheads and phenomena related to scheduling are shown to dominate the behavior of the system. The authors discuss techniques that helped them to alleviate these problems, and argue that they reveal general principles applicable to other kinds of high-data-rate protocols and applications in managed settings.