6.6. Advantages of Asynchronous Drawbridges

Asynchronous drawbridges have four important benefits over synchronous drawbridges:

  1. They have nonblocking workflow.

  2. They give pseudoreliability.

  3. They provide workload averaging.

  4. They can be used to implement a poor-man's cluster.

I'll describe each of these in Sections 6.6.1 through 6.6.4.

6.6.1. Nonblocking Workflow

The nonblocking characteristic of asynchronous drawbridges is probably the most familiar. Once an infogram has been placed in the asynchronous drawbridge, the donor fortress can go on its merry way. No waiting. If it takes two hours for the recipient fortress to get around to receiving the infogram and another two hours for the work to complete, it shouldn't matter. If it does matter, then ...

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