RFC 1862 (rfc1862) - Page 3 of 27

Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12-14, 1994

RFC 1862                  IAB Workshop Report              November 1995


  -  articulating the procedures necessary to facilitate joining IETF
     working group meetings, and

  -  reviewing the key distribution infrastructure for use in
     information applications

3. Group 1 report: The Distributed Database Problem

   Elise Gerich, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark McCahill, Dave Sincoskie, Mike
   Schwartz, Mitra, Yakov Rekhter, John Klensin, Steve Crocker, Ton
   Verschuren

   Editors: Mark McCahill, Mike Schwartz, Ton Verschuren

3.1 Problem and Needs

   Because of the increasing popularity of accessing networked
   information, current Internet information services are experiencing
   performance, reliability, and scaling problems.  These are general
   problems, given the distributed nature of the Internet.  Current and
   future applications would benefit from much more widespread use of
   caching and replication.

   For instance, popular WWW and Gopher servers experience serious
   overloading, as many thousands of users per day attempt to access
   them simultaneously.  Neither of these systems was designed with
   explicit caching or replication support in the core protocol.
   Moreover, because the DNS is currently the only widely deployed
   distributed and replicated data storage system in the Internet, it is
   often used to help support more scalable operation in this
   environment -- for example, storing service-specific pointer
   information, or providing a means of rotating service accesses among
   replicated copies of NCSA's extremely popular WWW server.  In most
   cases, such uses of the DNS semantically overload the system.  The
   DNS may not be able to stand such "semantic extensions" and continue
   to perform well.  It was not designed to be a general-purpose
   replicated distributed database system.

   There are many examples of systems that need or would benefit from
   caching or replication.  Examples include key distribution for
   authentication services, DHCP, multicast SD, and Internet white
   pages.

   To date there have been a number of independent attempts to provide
   caching and replication facilities.  The question we address here is
   whether it might be possible to define a general service interface or
   protocol, so that caches and replica servers (implemented in a
   variety of ways to support a range of different situations) might



McCahill, et al              Informational