Requirements for interoperability and reusability motivate the use of object oriented middleware like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). However, unless CORBA can be implemented efficiently, it will not be widely used in real time and other latency-sensitive distributed applications. The paper presents three performance enhancement techniques for CORBA based middleware. Two of these exploit limited heterogeneity in systems. In such a system a standard CORBA protocol is used when clients and servers interacting with one another are implemented by using different programming languages and/or operating systems. However, when a similar client-server pair built using the same technology communicates, a number of CORBA operations are bypassed, thus reducing the communication overhead. Based on a commercial middleware product and measurements made on a performance prototype running on a network of workstations, this research demonstrates that there is a strong potential for achieving a significant performance improvement by incorporating these techniques into the middleware.
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