Contention-aware metrics for distributed algorithms: comparison of atomic broadcast algorithms

Resource contention is widely recognized as having a major impact on the performance of distributed algorithms. Nevertheless, the metrics that are commonly used to predict their performance take little or no account of contention. We define two performance metrics for distributed algorithms that account for network contention as well as CPU contention. We then illustrate the use of these metrics by comparing four atomic broadcast algorithms, and show that our metrics allow for a deeper understanding of performance issues than conventional metrics.