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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS)
CTXS 103.900.0%Nov 2 5:00 PM EST

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To: Dinesh who wrote (8090)5/18/2000 11:26:00 PM
From: Heeren Pathak  Read Replies (1) of 9068
 
Dinesh,

Actually, your ex[erience with SSL mode is EXACTLY the problem Citrix faces and why it has scalibility issues. In SSL mode, the server MUST maintain shared context with the client. The reason for this is that SSL version 3 closed a security loophole that allow proxy servers to redirect traffic. While that feature would be nice for distributing load, it have obviously security holes that really needed to be fixed. To overcome the SSL issues, you are starting to see SSL gateways that handle a large number of SSL connections and convert them to normal HTTP connections that can be distributed over a number of servers. This approach should scale more since the encryption / decryption work is being done in hardware on a dedicated box.

Citrix has a similar issue. Once a session has started, the application and the ICA client must maintain a shared context. This context limits the scalibility of the overall system. Unfortunately, Citrix has a tougher issue if they want to improve scalibitily. Citrix's big selling point is that any app can be run without doing anything special to the app. To make the app scalible, it would have to be a context-free app and that is not going to happen. Thus, there isn't going to be a simple solution to improve scalibility.

The other issue you bring up about scalibility is more of a caching issue. One way to increase scalibility is to widely distribute information into localized caches. The success of any caching scheme lies in its ability to maintain a high hit rate and cache coherency. The hit rate is pretty easy to achieve. However, cache coherency is quite a challenge and tends to be where cache design most often fail.

Heeren
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