9.3. Design Issues

As with anything else, RPCs have trade-offs. RPCs' disadvantages stem primarily from the fact that the network is being used to transport parameters and results back and forth. This tends to give RPCs high latencies. RPCs also have a fairly significant per-call overhead because of the amount of coordinating the system is doing behind the scenes. It is important for you to understand the overhead and trade-offs involved with RPCs so that you can design effective RPC architectures.

The best way to get a feel for the trade-offs involved with RPCs is to walk through the design of a simple RPC application. For example, let's walk through the design of a simple Mandelbrot-set application and see if RPCs can speed up its execution ...

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