Scalability issues in CORBA

Scalability is recognised as a primary factor to be considered in the design of distributed systems. The scalability of object-oriented middleware CORBA is becoming a major concern as it has emerged as a standard architecture for distributed object computing. In this paper, a systematic scalability analysis of the basic components of the CORBA specification is attempted. From this analysis, the Portable Object Adapter (POA) and the Implementation Repository (IR) are identified to influence the scale of a CORBA-based system. The specification of the POA provides enough feasibility for the application designer to handle scalability. The existing implementations of IR have a tradeoff between scalability and object migration. A scalable design of the IR is proposed which allows individual objects to migrate without compromising scalability. A performance comparison of the proposed model with existing IR designs is made using a simulation study