Limitation of Distributed system

Top Limitation of Distributed system

  • A distributed system is a set of computers that communicate over a network, and do not share a common memory or a common clock
  • Absence of a common (global) clock
    • No concept of global time
    • It’s difficult to reason about the temporal ordering of events
      • Cooperation between processes (e.g., producer/consumer, client/server)
      • Arrival of requests to the OS (e.g., for resources)
      • Collecting up-to-date global state
  • It’s difficult to design and debug algorithms in a distributed system
    • Mutual exclusion
    • Synchronization
    • Deadlock
  • Absence of shared memory means “state” is distributed throughout system
  • One process can get either:
    • a coherent but partial view of the system
    • or an incoherent but complete (global) view of the system
  • where coherent means:
    • all local views of the state, plus
    • any messages that are in transit
  • It is very difficult for every process to get a complete and coherent view of the global state
    • Example: one person has two bank accounts, and is in process of transferring $50 between the two accounts

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