Implementing the CORBA GIOP in a high-performance object request broker environment

The success of the Object Management Group's General Inter-ORE Protocol (GI OP) is leading to the desire to deploy GIOP in an ever-wider range of appli cation areas, many of which are significantly more demanding than tradition al areas in terms of performance. The well-known performance limitations of present day GIOP-based object request brokers (ORBs) are therefore increas ingly being seen as a problem. To help address this problem, this paper dis cusses a GIOP implementation which has high performance and quality of serv ice support as explicit goals. The implementation, which is embedded in a r esearch ORE called GOPI, is modular and extensible in nature and includes n ovel optimization techniques which should be separately portable to other O RE environments. This paper focuses on the message protocol aspects of GOPI 's GIOP implementation; higher layer issues such as marshalling and operati on demultiplexing are not covered in detail. Figures are provided which pos ition GOPI's GIOP performance against comparable ORBs. The paper also discu sses some of the design decisions that have been made in the development of the GIOP protocol in the light of our implementation experience.