Performance evaluation of the Meta-ORB reflective middleware platform

Reflection has found its way into middleware platforms as a principled technique to provide flexible infrastructures that can dynamically adapt to meet new or changing requirements. In this context, there is a common belief that the use of such a technique incurs unacceptable overheads. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of reflective middleware, comparing it with non-reflective approaches and with requirements of an important class of applications. The aim is to show that, although the associated overhead cannot be ignored, it is well within acceptable limits. The work is done in the context of a particular reflective middleware platform, the Meta-ORB Python prototype of Open ORB. In this context, we also demonstrate that the integration of meta-information management and reflection does not compromise performance, at the same time as it allows a uniform programming model.