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Networking experiments indicate the majority of networking delays may be the result of waiting for responses, not the actual transmission times. In the experiments, one megabyte of data was sent from one machine to another. In one case, the data was just dumped to the network without waiting for any kind of response. In the other case, the data was sent in 1K parcels, then the sender would wait for an acknowledgement from the other side. The case without acknowledgements was an order of magnitude faster.

Although there are many factors at play in network performance, this indicates clearly that handshakes should be asynchronous where possible. This is the result that was expected.

This distributed computing capability is working in D2K v3.0 beta. A gui has been developed to allow the user to easily assign modules to machines. Once the assignment is made, at runtime, the modules are moved to the appropriate machine for execution. This assignment is saved with the itinerary.

David Clutters new URL class loader mechanism has been integrated with D2K. This will allow us to drop jar files into the modules path where the system will be able to access them without adding them to the application's classpath. Although not our current focus, this will allow us to support multiple module paths in the future. David has also rewritten the directory parser and the display mechanism for the trees that are displayed in the tabbed pane on the left of the D2K window. They seem to work much better, and he removed several classes from D2K.